Categories
Service Reviews

Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Canada

Today, I downloaded the Mac app for Amazon Music.

I saw this mentioned in some tech article and thought, “Hey, I’m an Amazon Prime Member! Maybe I could ditch Spotify and get some ad-free Music playing for when I work. Even if it doesn’t have the latest pop tunes. I just need lots of soundtracks with ambience for when working!”

To my dismay, logging in with my Prime credentials, the app did not recognize that I had a Prime membership.

I suspect the problem is that I have an Amazon Canada Prime membership and not an Amazon US Prime membership. This is frustrating. It should really be global and unified. For people who travel lots and/or live in different countries in different times of the year, this is disappointing. Heck, even for Canadians staying put in Canada, this is frustrating.

Amazon music player for mac

 

So I wrote to support. Fingers crossed the feedback leads to some improvements in the coming months and years. Here was my feedback support email:

Hi,

I’m living in Canada and have an Amazon Canada Prime membership. I downloaded the Amazon Music app, logged in, but it still doesn’t recognize me as a Prime Member. There’s no documentation explaining this for Canadian users.

I also have a US Amazon.com account (same credentials exactly), and used to be a US Prime member when I’ve lived there too.

Please advise. I’d like to invest more in Amazon and ditch Spotify, but not giving Canadian Prime customers the same benefits you give US Prime customers is frustrating and unfortunate.

Honestly, I’d like to see you unify Prime to be a global membership. Let me also have the benefit of fast shipping when I’m in the US, UK or Canada with one single Mega Prime Membership.

 

Categories
Business & Startups

Startup Harmony: The Time Based Revenue Model

I recently came across a question on Clarity.fm regarding what to do when co-founders aren’t pulling their weight.

My answer (a variation of this blog post) is about how to pre-empt any resentment that is inevitable in such situations, by putting together a financial model that acknowledges the time that each co-founder is investing into the business.

For the particular CEO who asked the question, I believe they need different co-founders, who are actually capable of fulfilling their assigned roles. However, assuming that the people in your startup have the right skills and/or the capacity to grow into the roles that need filling, I propose a tactical model for income distribution in the early years.

My Advice

I’ve got a tactical model you may find useful to employ to remove the tension and resentment before it escalates.

I’m currently on my second startup, it’s just myself and one co-founder.

A decade ago, I had three other partners. What I learned then was that everyone will go through different challenges in their own lives, at different times. This of course, affects our ability (time, energy) to contribute to the business.

Others (Jason, Ken) have answered your question here from important angles you should consider first. I wanted to add some tactical tips (a model, in fact) that you could put into place; but only after you’ve covered those big-picture topics.

These techniques all assume one thing however: trust. If you don’t have that, then you really shouldn’t be in business with your co-founders.

First, if you have revenue, you can assign everyone the same hourly rate. The income you distribute amongst the team is simply a matter of how many hours everyone worked.

If you don’t have predictable income yet (but you have some), you can split the income that you do generate in the company amongst yourselves, based on the proportion of hours worked in that period. This actually works better than a flat hourly rate, as it provides more incentive for everyone to work on making real revenue with the venture.

Let’s say you choose quarterly as your time period, and your timesheet has you working twice as much as your co-founder. You’d then naturally get 2/3 of the income generated in that quarter.

Even though you might have a 50/50 equity split, you can put in an agreement between yourselves that treats all income generated by the company for the first (or next) x years this way. Perhaps x is five years, by which time, these sorts of issues typically of concern in a startup, won’t be as pressing or even relevant.

Another variation to this is to track company income from inception. The proportion of time each co-founder puts in over the life of the startup to date, is the proportion of its generated income that they are owed. This removes co-founders “surging” their efforts in quarters that are known to bring in a disproportionate amount of revenue (should such a situation be possible in your startup).

Yet another variation that tests everyone’s commitment to the business, is have all work income generated by all partners (whether through other day jobs, contract revenue etc.) put into the company pot, and re-distributed in this model. In that way, the co-founder only participating part time has a bigger role: they are helping bring in income for everyone, and it gets distributed based on how much time everyone is putting in respectively, across all of these activities.

Finally, you can add a time component to this whole formula: time logged in the first year of the company is like the deposit of a financial investment into the company: it earns interest.

It is worth more than the same amount of time deposited into the company in year three, when the company is likely more established. Generally, as time goes on, as there is less risk to pour your time into the company; you should have more clarity about the company’s prospects.

Thought of another way: the Angel takes on more risk than the Series B venture round (a downround being the exception here).

Therefore, the Angel’s investment, dollar for dollar, is going to have a higher percentage of ownership. Similarly, you can treat everyone’s investment of time in the early days this way; it gets seasoned. You incentive co-founders to put in more effort early when it is not as clear that you’ll succeed, and when the company most needs that push.

With these tools in place (you can setup a spreadsheet to track this), you will not resent your partners if they need to take a 6 month sabbatical, or work much fewer hours than you do. It can take the tension out of these critical relationships.

Note that if you don’t yet have any income from the venture, but you expect it will be coming soon, extend the timeframe of the model to cover the point that you would have reached success (and then some) or have ultimately disbanded.

This model is like training wheels. It’s a gentler transition from the standard FTE or solo contract income world into one of shared destiny with your co-founders.

Update: July 9, 2015

A friend on Twitter pointed me to a much more robust model called “Slicing Pie”. You can learn about it at via this excellent presentation done at Stanford.

The only contention I have with Mike Moyer’s model (discussed at time index 37:00) is that he dismisses the concept of relative value based on time, because it is not observable (the way the rest of his model is).

However, I do believe founders can adapt the slicing pie model to use an agreed upon, and self-assigned IRR (internal rate of return) percentage that applies to everyone, across the board, year after year (whether indefinitely, for a fixed number of years only, or until an investment event — such as Series A funding).

Categories
Opinion Service Reviews

Groupon’s Misleading Deal Pages

I recently needed to get some auto detailing done, and thought I’d rummage through LivingSocial.com and Groupon.com to find any auto-detailing deals in the area. I went with Groupon. What a mistake. They don’t seem to vet the vendors at all.

The Public Deal Page

Here’s the public front page of the deal I purchased: https://www.groupon.com/deals/detail-auto. Since that URL will cycle through different deals, here’s a photo of what you’ll see at the time this post was written:

Deal front page

Sure, there’s only 23% of who chimed in with a thumbs up, but perhaps most people just don’t bother giving feedback. After all, there are no thumbs down ratings visible here.

The Publicly Visible Testimonials

Let’s look at the publicly visible testimonials for this deal. The three testimonials look really positive. You can’t glean anything negative about this vendor.

 

Public page testimonials

 

The Post-Purchase Visible Reviews

Now that I’ve purchased, the page I can access for this deal gives me access to all reviews. Surprise surprise. These guys have a horrendous reputation. See below. Not a single positive review on the first page. The only good reviews are right at the beginning, and very short. Suspect.

Why does Groupon have a thumbs up icon next to each of these reviews when they are all bad reviews?

 

The real reviews

 

No Refund Contact-Us Link Available

Since I purchased the deal about 5 days ago, I’m outside the window of requesting a refund. There’s no button on the Groupon website to do so. I can’t find a phone number to call. There’s no one I can email. I keep going in circles trying to find a support link that will let me contact someone with a human brain, instead of getting looped through “read this policy” and “read these fine print details”. Nothing. No way to reach a real human being and have a conversation.

I’m not comfortable taking an expensive vehicle to a shoddy place with water damage reviews like this.

Lesson learned: be weary using Groupon.

Epilogue

I finally find a way to chat with a human agent by stating that I couldn’t get in touch with the vendor (which is true; I just tried calling and their voicemail box is full). I’ve got a refund in ‘Groupon Bucks’, but I’ll be sure to use those in more established businesses, if I can even find such deals.

 

Groupon Live Chat

 

Categories
Opinion Social Commentary

On Asking for Advice: Avoid Excessive Apology

In software development, there’s always a lot to keep up with. Many of us focus on our technical skills and often times, the softer skills are neglected. This post is about tips for those seeking help — especially technical — but also in the soft skills area.

I cam across someone in the past year who often emails me with developer (technical) questions. Recently, this person emailed me about challenges relating to soft skills and being able to convey one’s ideas effectively with other developers in their team.

Often times, questions from this person show up in my mailbox as “Question for you”.

Given that I’m often asked for advice on various topics, the advice I’d give the person felt relevant to share with a wider audience.

That’s why I wrote a more detailed response for this person, hoping to provide some direction not just for him, but for many others who seek advice but don’t know how to go about asking for it.

While my advice was tailored to this individual, I believe much of the guidance will resonate with others who unbeknownst to themselves, might be using profuse praise (of others), deprecation (of self) and profuse apology as a crutch to get others to help them, instead of “doing the work” to build their own knowledge base, character and life skills.

With that opening context, here’s some of the advice I gave this person in an email. You’ll notice that at points, my advice may seem a bit harsh.

In most contexts, I don’t advise this. Often times however, the very soft messages don’t plant a strong enough seed for action.

Skills for Influence

Here’s a book to read that will get you 80% of the way to understanding what soft skills and influence skills you’ll need in your career. I try to review it every couple of years. It’s the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

Reading this, further discussions relating to interpersonal challenges will no doubt, be much higher bandwidth, so to speak.

Email Subject Lines

Best not to start emails with generic, low-specificity subject lines like “Question for you”. That doesn’t really help the receiver assess anything at a glance. Or find things in one’s mailbox weeks later. Just like a stackoverflow post, be specific, yet concise. Strip out words that would be inferred.

For example, a better email subject line might be:

[Favour]: Soft skills and influence in the workplace / development tasks prioritization

When you, the one seeking someone else’s time and assistance, don’t put effort into your own request, the receiver is going to naturally have more of an aversion to your correspondence; subconsciously lumping you in with low value activities.

Reversing that negative subconscious reaction is not compensated for with profuse praise and thank-you’s. Such behavior can come across as needy, which is not only unattractive to women, being a man, but also unattractive to other men.

The Approach

Limit your praise and thank-you’s commensurate with the context; not as a way to make the receiver feel guilty if they turn you down. You want people to respond to you from a positive place, not one of pseudo-guilt, obligation or extreme empathy.

I’ve noticed some people who excessively apologize when asking for help or advice. When this manner of asking questions is repeated, this appears to others as a crutch for not being willing or able to “do the work”.

Don’t use apology as a cover for people legitimately wondering why you’ve not systematically covered basic source material you’re asking about. And if you’ve been called out on it, do your homework before going back with more questions.

On Getting Advice

Finally, if you ask a question or get advice, but then don’t take heed of the advice you’ve been given, realize that the person you’ve asked repeatedly for help will become disinclined to help you in the future.

Think about it from the receiver’s perspective:

Why should I answer this person’s questions? They won’t heed my advice or go through the material I’ve suggested in any reasonable amount of time anyways. They just want me to do all of their thinking for them. This doesn’t demonstrate initiative. 

For more on how to ask for favors and on how to get advice, mentors, etc., a must-read is the book The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg.

Owning social intelligence can more easily move you from being the freelancer who bills at $x/hr to the one who commands $1.5x/hr or even $2x/hr.

These soft skills are worth investing in. Couple that with solid technical skills, and you’ll be a rare breed indeed.

Categories
Opinion Service Reviews

Ridiculous Uber Trip Cancellation Policy

Yesterday, I took an Uber. The weather was beautiful for a 25 min walk, but my friend and I needed to get to the theatre, and so I thought Uber would be faster.

An UberX was “3 minutes” away. We ordered one up. The three minutes passed. Several more minutes passed.

We kept waiting. It said the driver was still “3 minutes” away.

We were running out of time to get to the theatre (a live performance; might not get seated if you’re late).

To our dismay, the Uber app on my iPhone relayed, “Trip Cancelled”. Why would the driver cancel on me!?

Immediately, I ordered another Uber. That one came and we got to our destination, just in the nick of time.

Today, I woke up with a $5 cancellation charge in my email inbox, from Uber.

Imagine my frustration. Insult to injury!

To Uber’s credit, they reversed the charge and gave me a $10 credit.

However, their policy response on Twitter has me scratching my head. Uber reserves the right to charge a cancellation fee to the customer when a driver cancels on the customer!? WTF!? Seriously? How dumb is that?

This is the policy cited by Uber Support in response to me asking why they couldn’t tell the difference between a driver cancellation and a customer cancellation.

By directing me to that policy, they are effectively saying that “if you use our service, and don’t do anything wrong, we may charge you $5 and provide you with aggravation and no service”. It’s like ordering a pizza, waiting for 15 minutes as you think they are making it, and then having the pizza shop cancel your order, and charge you $5 because it was cancelled. Oh, and you don’t get a pizza.

Here’s my conversation with Uber Support.

Clearly, Uber has a really dumb policy on their hands, and/or support staff lacking common sense.

Categories
Technology Tips

Recording a GoToMeeting Session on the Mac

Recording GoToMeeting sessions or any other type of online conference call gets tricky on the Mac, because often the system sound actually doesn’t get recorded; or just your own side will.

While GoToMeeting is sometimes packaged with a built-in recording capability (depending on your country and the tier you purchased into), you can find the GoToMeeting service discounted at $19.95 per month if you sign up on the Canadian website and get the basic plan without the ability to do recordings. This is a $30/month savings over the standard monthly plan, if you can get it. Pricing jumps like these often make the difference between purchasing the tool (subscription) or not.

But what about when you do need the odd recording done? Using a screen recording tool and the default settings on your Mac will typically result in a screencast with partial or no audio.

There’s a long technical explanation for this, but basically, we need to loop your audio output into (or rather, alongside) your audio input device. That way, when you elect to record ‘input’ audio from a chosen device, it’ll carry your computer’s normal audio along with whatever input (i.e. your voice) that you’re also sending in.

In my case, I have a USB Plantronics headset with a boom mic that I wanted input captured from and on which I wanted to hear the computer’s audio with (because that’s how I’d hear other participants in the online meeting).

As I’ll explain below, I will create an aggregate input device on my Mac, comprised of my Plantronics headset (so I can hear others during the call) and the Soundflower (2ch) device, which is going to loop output from the rest of the system into the input device we’ll select when recording with a tool such as the built-in QuickTime Player.

Here’s a concise summary of the steps involved:

  1. Install the latest Soundflower app, if you haven’t already. You’ll need to reboot before configuring.
  2. Watch this video if you need help with setup. The instructions below are an abbreviation of what was learned in the video just linked to.
  3. Open Audio MIDI Setup in OS X.
  4. In Audio MIDI Setup, create an ‘Aggregate Device’ with two devices: your microphone and the Soundflower (2ch). I use my Plantronics Headset for the microphone.
  5. In Audio MIDI Setup, create a ‘Multi-Output Device’ with three devices: ‘Built-in Output’, ‘Soundflower (2ch)’ and your headset (i.e. Plantronics Headset in the illustration)
  6. In Audio MIDI Setup, make ‘Aggregate Device’ the default sound input.
  7. In Audio MIDI Setup, make ‘Multi-Output Device’ the default sound output.

Here’s what the Aggregate Device input looks like, once configured:

Input - Aggregate Device

And here’s what the Multi Output Device looks like, once configured:

Output - Multi-Output Device

Because we’ve included the Plantronics headset as one of the items in the Multi-Output Device, we’ll be able to hear audio from the computer too (crucial for hearing other callers in an online meeting!)

GoToMeeting

Select your headset/mic for the input device as you normally would and set the output device within the GoToMeeting control panel to the Multi-Output Device. Even though you may mute your headset’s mic in GoToMeeting, it is still sending what it hears into the Aggregate Device for audio recording. Therefore, to truly mute yourself, do it with a hardware switch on your headset microphone.

ScreenFlow

You can select ‘Aggregate Device’ as the input device, and unselect ‘Record Computer Audio’, since the latter option won’t even let you start recording in this configuration. Now once you record, I’ve found that on Mac OS X 10.9 with the latest Screenflow 4.5 (current in Feb 2014), that my own audio comes in with static. So, I don’t recommend ScreenFlow for this use case. I’ve sometimes gotten it to work, but it seems that Quicktime handles the audio better (less or no static).

Quicktime

The built in recording facility with the Quicktime Player actually does a great job, and there’s no static sound! Again, before recording, we must select ‘Aggregate Device’ as the input for recording. We can also select which screen or even give QT a rectangular region of the screen to record into.

After the Recording

Once done, set the default input and output sound devices to what you’d normally use from the Audio MIDI Setup app, and they’re back in your control.

Sound Settings back to their defaults

Categories
Technology Tips

Improving Network Coverage in the Home

Most of us have WiFi in the home. Often times, coverage is spotty and frustrating. This is especially true in larger homes.

In 2006, I wrote about creating a better home network using the HomePlug class of devices, to provide you with ethernet over home electrical wiring. Those devices have continued to improve.

I do prefer a solid wired connection to a wireless connection, any day. However, with tablets and smartphones, only wireless is practical (or even possible). So having a good wireless solution makes sense. That said, there is some controversy about the health effects of being around WiFi.

Beyond good wifi, there’s also the issue of not getting good cell phone reception within one’s home. Solving that is also not without health controversies.

As I’m often asked similar questions by friends and family, I thought I’d provide an update and cover two related topics.

  1. Boosting WiFi (and broadband) within the home
  2. Boosting cell phone signal strength in your home

Boosting WiFi

Most of us have WiFi provided by the cable modem / router device that our Internet provider gives us. If you use WiFi in a nearby room, you’re generally fine. If not, one solution is to move your cable modem to a room that is closer to where you intend to use WiFi. If this isn’t a good option, you can get WiFi network extenders, so that WiFi is generated at multiple points in your home.

To do that however, it’s best to have a wired network running throughout your home. Some modern homes do have Ethernet jacks in every room. If you’ve got that, you’re fortunate. If you don’t, running a system in your house can take a contractor a few days and typically costs about $5K-$7K US to do right.

A passable next best alternative, is to use devices that extend your wired ethernet capabilities, using the electrical wiring in your home. Such devices conform to a standard known as HomePlug. You plug a device into a power socket in your wall. Into the device, you plug in the Ethernet cable from your router. You then take another HomePlug device, and plug it into the wall in a different room. You can continue to do this wherever you want wired Ethernet access. The data travels over your home’s electrical circuit, as if it were a computer network.

At satellite locations in your home, you can plug a laptop into the wired Ethernet HomePlug device, and generally enjoy good speeds, comparable to really good WiFi, if not better. You can also plug in a wireless router into one of these satellite HomePlug adapters, and configure it to extended your existing wireless network. This is what can give you much better WiFi coverage throughout your home.

Note however, that if you’re extending WiFi in this way, it’s often very difficult to do using the cable company’s own WiFi router. It’s best to have that configured in what’s called bridged mode, and connect your own WiFi router to the cable company’s cable modem/router. You’ll then add a second WiFi router at a satellite location, configured to extend your wireless network.

Most of the time, you’ll have to call the cable company and ask them to remotely set their cable modem into bridged mode and to turn off their built-in WiFi.

While your setup will still work without these steps, your network will run better if you tie up these loose ends.

Suggested Products

It’s been a while since I’ve shopped for products in these categories, but here are my best suggestions based on specs, reviews and purported ease of use:

HomePlug Devices

You’ll need at least two devices to make this work. Often, starter packs as a set of 2 are available. This set looks promising:

WiFi Routers

  1. Apple Base Station Extreme 2013. This is for the main router, that will plug into your cable modem.
  2. Apple Airport Express. This is what we’ll use to provide some satellite location with a boost of WiFi.

You’ll also need some Ethernet cables with the HomePlug devices, but these are quite inexpensive if you order from Amazon.com. Get one cable for each of the the devices above.

Boosting Cell Phone Signal

The major cell phone companies in the US have mini cell towers that you can purchase and install in your home. They plug into your home network, and when you’re in range of these microcells, your cell phone will connect to them for sending and receiving voice calls.

It’s best to purchase these directly from your cell phone company to get a new unit properly configured for your account. That said, most users indicate that there’s some setup involved beyond just plugging in the device into your network, such as using a web page to configure what phone numbers are authorized to connect to your microcell.

Verizon Wireless

For Verizon Wireless, you can order their Samsung Network Extender (SCS-2U01) microcell online.

AT&T

Similarly, for AT&T, you can order their Cisco 3G microcell via an authorized AT&T store.

Categories
Blogging

Blog Relaunch

This is a relaunch of my personal blog. If you’re looking for my professional blog, that is now at sohail.io.

My past writings have now been re-launched here on this blog, idStar.org. The name comes from my Twitter handle, @idStar. That handle has a longer etymology to it – perhaps content for a future post.

But back to the topic of blogging.

In many ways, by blogging, we obtain the oft-cited benefits of journaling, except that the content is geared toward public consumption.

I started blogging almost a decade ago, as I’d often be asked for technical support by family and friends. This got repetitive. So, I opted to blog my advice and findings, instead of creating one-off email responses. This actually helped reduce the support load.

Being on a free blogging service without your own domain however, felt like an invitation to just not take it seriously. I’m sure some don’t feel that limitation. I tend to only invest in things that I can put a polished effort into.

While I’ve imported my historical blog posts into this blog, I do look back at some of the older posts and cringe at my writing style, choice of punctuation, flow, etc.

This feeling is not too different from how us software engineers (if we’re continuing to grow and improve), look back at our code from just a year earlier and feel like we could do so much better now.

In the last few years, I have had several moments where I’ve paused and wanted to write about something, both of a professional nature and for a personal blog.

I kept putting these opportunities off, because I didn’t feel like I had a place to put them that was worthy of the investment I would want to make in such blog posts.

It was always going to happen after I released the app my design partner and I are working on, since that took priority.

However, I finally decided this week, to no longer defer it. Diving into WordPress, widgets, premium themes and plugins took some time, but I’m glad I did it.

No doubt, I should have just done this years ago.

Now that I have this altogether and ready for when inspiration strikes, I am actually quite excited.

And with that, welcome.

Categories
Opinion Social Commentary

First Aid + CPR Course with St. John’s Ambulance

This post relays my experience at a 2-day First Aid and CPR training course in 2011 in Mississauga (Canada). There were so many issues with how the class was run, that I had to document it all. It is best relayed as a recounting of events. And so the story follows.

St. John’s Ambulance Offices, Mississauga. December 28-29, 2011

“You can get ace from breadth,” asserted our First Aid and CPR Instructor.

“We can get what from breath?” asked one of the students, puzzled.

“Ace,” responded the Instructor.

“I’m not familiar with that condition,” relayed another student who was confused like the rest of us.

“You know, ace! H – I – V; Ace!” exclaimed the Instructor.

“Oh, you mean AIDS!” chimed in several of us students.

The Instructor was early into Day 1 of our First Aid and CPR course, explaining why a First Aider wears gloves and the protocol of using a breathing barrier when giving breaths into an injured person’s mouth.

“I don’t think you can get AIDS from someone’s breath” I gently asserted. But the Instructor nodded his head, “Yes, you can get it from the breadth”. Several of us students looked at each other confused and re-iterated, “Certainly from blood, but not from human breath!”.

After a couple more seconds of processing, the Instructor nodded and said, “Yes, from breadth”. We re-iterated, “So do you mean blood and not human breath?” to which the Instructor nodded and we finally had understanding. This set the tone for the level of misunderstandings the Instructor’s accent and grasp of English would portend for the rest of the course.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how in a subject like first aid, dealing with minutes, unconsciousness, life and death, nuance matters.

I believe that we have a false sense of safety when it comes to First Aid readiness. The more people who legitimately know First Aid and CPR, the safer we are, no doubt.

I just took a two-day course with St. John’s Ambulance in Mississauga, Ontario and was very disappointed on so many levels. We have a moral obligation to share such observations. So I put my thoughts down into words.

I believe our system of training in such important matters, needs some CPR of its own. We’ve become complacent. From the way the course is taught, to the lack of a practical exam to the lack of a true written exam before certification is granted, the entire course seems like it was designed to check a box. A box in a paper shuffling bureaucracy between employers, their employees and training organizations. For someone hurt and in need of first aid, this could quite literally be insult to injury. So how bad is it?

Sampling just my own class, I doubt more than 25% of the class would know how to perform more than 25% of what was covered in the two day course.

We are fortunate to live in a society where we can dial 9-1-1 and have emergency responders at our door in minutes. Sometimes that can still be too late to save a life or reduce the risk of permanent injury.

Enter the First Aider. Our workplaces often have one or more people assigned to keep their First Aid and CPR certification current. If we’re out on the streets and someone is hurt, a First Aider may get to the scene before 9-1-1 responders arrive. They can start CPR, triage multiple casualties or stop the bleeding from a knife wound.

There’s no doubt that these skills play an important role in the physical safety of our communities for when accidents and injury strike.

Growing up in Canada, I always held the St. John’s Ambulance non-profit organization in very high esteem. They have a tradition of competence and service. So when my VA short listed them in response to my query for First Aid and CPR training in my area, I was excited about getting what I anticipated to be top notch training in the field. I don’t have a medical background, but I believe we all have a civic and familial responsibility to proactively develop and refresh such skills.

The Instructor

Our Instructor had been teaching the course for many years. You could tell that he himself was competent and would know what to do in a myriad of emergency situations. Knowing is of course, not the same as teaching.

I liked that the Instructor had enthusiasm in his teaching and I know his desire to teach comes from a good place.

The Instructor exudes a warmth where you just don’t want to be critical of him. Objectively speaking though, the course was not taught well.

There’s not even a good feedback mechanism for the course. Evaluations at the end of the course are attached to and handed in with a student’s answer sheet.

“May I mail in my evaluation sheet?” I politely asked after writing my exam at the end of the course.

“No, you have to turn it in now,” explained the Instructor.

Knowing students can’t anonymously give feedback after a course, how candid should we expect it to be? Most organizations don’t set themselves up for such failure in feedback. I don’t know why St. John’s Ambulance doesn’t have better procedures (a simple locked feedback form deposit box that only the Instructor’s superior can open would suffice).

Back to the start of the class.

The Instructor started off with trying to create a comedic environment, and this went on for several minutes. But we’re here for a First Aid course. Do we really need to start off with awkward levity, half of which we won’t even understand because of the Instructor’s broken English? We’re now confused, and the Instructor hasn’t even taught anything yet.

I grew up in Canada and am no stranger to using humour, movement, and interactivity to awaken and engage an audience. This was not that. It was out of place, awkward and confusing.

What exacerbated the entire learning experience, was the Instructor’s thick accent and incoherent English. He could technically speak English, but not well.

The average person could articulate and understand a typical first aid concept in say, fifteen seconds. This same level of complexity of an idea would however, take a full minute for the Instructor to convey in broken English. And the majority of us students, would still not be able to comprehend half of what was taught in that time.

At first, I didn’t interject, but as I saw this confusion and misunderstanding continue, I begin to ask clarifying questions after every few minutes, rephrasing what I thought the Instructor meant, and then asking him to confirm. This was helpful to me (and I believe others), but it shouldn’t have been necessary.

As Canadians, we embrace immigrants and we do our best to accommodate fellow Canadians who on the surface look and sound very different than us. I am proud of this tradition of ours. My own parents coming to Canada in the 70’s were granted opportunities because of this wonderful multicultural acceptance, irrespective of their coloured skin.

Some would advocate not having non-native English speakers taking on teaching roles. But I do believe they can still be effective, if they and their organizations put in the work to compensate for the gaps their lack of language proficiency creates.

This is what was absent (see my thoughts further down on how we can better support teachers who aren’t fluent with English).

I believe when dealing with things medical / emergency related, nuance does matter. You can’t effectively communicate nuance if you’re not reasonably articulate.

Support Materials

Throughout the course, we’d switch to short segments in a DVD prepared by St. John’s Ambulance, that the Instructor would often use as an introduction or a synopsis of the particular lesson. While these helped, there were often times where the dramatization conveyed inaccurate techniques (e.g. bandaging up way too tightly such that circulation would be impaired, etc.).

The Instructor would often call out these mistakes himself. Sometimes, us students could be heard rumbling that something looked off.

The Instructor did encourage us to write to the St. John’s Ambulance organization to suggest the DVD be updated to fix these mistakes. One would hope that a long time instructor within the organization could make that suggestion and it would have been acknowledged and acted upon.

The First Aid book we received on the morning of Day One was superb. This is the level of quality I expected of the St. John’s Ambulance organization. I will be reading this book to fill in the numerous gaps I myself still have.

The Course

The course follows a set syllabus; some DVD segments are played, with much writing on the white board and some hands on exercises sprinkled throughout both days. We paired up with other students to test out putting them in the recovery position, splinting a simulated broken arm and performing CPR on a dummy (among other hands on exercises).

Many elements of the course contain lists of steps and priorities. Often times, the Instructor would repeat these steps as he introduced the material. Instead of internalizing these steps in our minds, we students would be busy trying to decode what the Instructor said. And that meant we would miss what he said next.

As the course progressed, I would interject more frequently to clarify what was said. I could tell that the Instructor became anxious that we wouldn’t finish in time if this became a pattern. I do believe that in the time allotted, an articulate and effective teacher could have conveyed significantly more nuance and depth of understanding.

From the start, the Instructor emphasized preparing us for The Test. He’d wink at us multiple times when covering some material that was sure to be on the test. In small doses, telling us to pay attention here and there is fine. I did feel however, that this was done in excess.

An instructor shouldn’t have to wink at students to remember material. That should be a natural consequence of good instruction and diligent participation.

The Students

“My employer sent me,” relayed one student. On the first day, we all introduced ourselves.

“I need this certification to apply for such-and-such program,” remarked another.

Our particular class had almost 20 students, which is apparently the norm.

I introduced myself, “I’m here independently, and not from any company, because I believe it’s personally an important life skill to have.”

It struck me: most of the class didn’t volunteer to take First Aid + CPR training, they needed it to fill a requirement. I could tell that there were a handful of students who diligently paid attention and truly did want to learn the material. Most of them were too shy to interject when they didn’t understand, although I did witness this change well into day two, as other students began to realize that they would need to interject to obtain clarity, if they were going to leave the course with any meaningful take-aways.

A good portion of the class came from blue-collar industries where they are exposed to more occupational hazards. Enforcing first aid training makes a lot of sense. In these same industries, we also see a large portion of immigrants – non native English speakers. For them, understanding a perfectly articulate instructor is still a challenge. Layer on top of that, a non-native English speaker, speaking in broken English. It starts to become like the children’s game of broken telephone.

I wouldn’t mind all this signal loss if we were taking a class on painting. But this was First Aid and CPR.

From my subjective judgment, about 80%+ of the class would not have come if it weren’t a requirement for a job, some institution or they had to pay on their own.

It felt to me that many students were here to check a box; so the fact that the course and teaching was sub-par, didn’t phase them. They got paid for a couple of days off work, and got to sit back, and watch an instructor try to be funny at the front of the class. Why complain about not learning enough?

On the first day, when we went into an open classroom to do our first hands-on lesson, we were split up into two groups, the hypothetical injured (known as a “casualty” in First Aid terminology) and First Aiders, arriving at the scene. The Instructor asked us in the First Aiders group to enter the situation and follow up with the Scene Survey. At some point, one student refused to participate, citing he disagreed with a particular technique. The Instructor, to his credit, was incredibly patient with the recalcitrant student, a man in his late 50s.

The Instructor exhorted the student to follow the method of this course, trying to change the attitude of this uncooperative student, “If you’re going to take our course, then please follow our protocols. This is the technique we teach to help people!”

“I don’t want to help people,” calmly replied the defiant student. The rest of us stood in disbelief.

“If you don’t want to learn the Instructor’s way, then please leave and let us continue,” muttered some in the class.

Eventually, the uncooperative student passively and grudgingly went along with the lesson. Clearly, he needed a box checked on some form by some organization.

The Test

Our certification test was done in two parts, one part at the end of each day, but you could correct your answers on the second day, from the first day. It was all multiple choice.

“Do we look at signs and symptoms before the history step?” asked one test taker to another early on during the exam.

People writing the test could be heard whispering to each other, discussing the merits of one possible answer over another.

The Instructor walked around as people struggled with answering. He didn’t interject in the collaborative test taking. In fact, the Instructor could often be heard challenging a student, “Are you sure you want to answer ‘b’ for this one? Do you remember the steps of the Secondary Survey? Look at the board. It’s right there.”

There was no hands-on component to the test. Students didn’t have to demonstrate their knowledge in a test scenario, of anything. In group settings during the lessons we’d practice together, and you could ask questions, but that was it. If you did ask questions, there was no time to redo the practical component with your newfound clarity; the next lesson had already begun.

In my estimation, we should incorporate these hands-on skills (CPR techniques, AED usage, helping a choking victim, tying a sling to support a dislocated shoulder, etc.) into the test. We should do so in a manner similar to the way in which we conduct a practical exam for one’s driving license.

If we did test this way, the majority of the class I’m sure, would fail spectacularly.

“Here’s my answer sheet Sir.” I handed in my finished test paper. It was the end of Day Two.

“Thank you,” remarked the Instructor, as he was collecting papers.

“I’d actually like you to mark it so that I can then look at the answer sheet and correct my understanding for the answers I got wrong,” I requested.

“Here you go.” The Instructor handed me the answer sheet, “just correct your answers, don’t mark it as a mistake. Everybody gets 100 per cent!”

“No,” I remarked, “I’ll mark my mistakes as mistakes. I get what I got, but I just want to know where I went wrong so I know what I need to review.”

“Don’t mark it as mistake, just correct it,” insisted the concerned Instructor. I knew the Instructor liked me, despite what must have been annoying interjections during the class. He could at least tell I genuinely wanted to learn.

“No, I’m pretty sure I passed anyways, but I want the test to accurately reflect how I did,” I insisted.

“Okay, that’s the best way! I’m sure you did good!” quipped the Instructor with a smile, knowing I wasn’t going to change my mind.

Fifty out of Fifty-Four. Not bad I thought. I didn’t need to be gifted the one hundred per cent that was being dolled out. What purpose would that serve? I didn’t want to check a box. I had no need for a certificate. I just wanted to confidently know I knew First Aid and CPR.

An Emergent Picture

Remember that recalcitrant student who didn’t want to help people? The Instructor later remarked to some of us after class, that as an instructor of the First Aid course, he has the authority to fail any student he doesn’t feel should be certified. A few of us students remarked that situations like that student who clearly didn’t care, are exactly the kinds of situations in which this authority should be exercised by an Instructor.

Wouldn’t you want to have this student fail certification if he was a colleague of yours at your workplace and refused to participate in First Aid class?

Wouldn’t you want someone else on your shift assigned the role of First Aider, in the event of a real emergency?

Wouldn’t you implicitly trust that if a reputable organization like St. John’s Ambulance certified someone, that they would be very capable in a first aid situation?

What we should all be asking is, why is there such a reluctance to fail anyone?

With what I’ve already conveyed, astute readers may already see that we have a wider issue here. It’s not about one instructor – that would be scapegoating. It’s systemic. Here’s my hypothesis.

  1. Most students have to check a box on a requirement form for a job they have or a job they want; they’re just looking for a pass, a certificate, and perhaps more than a cursory understanding while they’re in class.
  2. Training / certification organizations like St. John’s Ambulance know that business and other institutions come to them because students get certified with few, if any failures.
  3. If St. John’s Ambulance began failing students, organizations would seek out alternate certifying bodies to minimize employee time off work and training expenditures. Even non-profits need steady revenue to defray operating costs.
  4. Training organizations know how effective or ineffective their instructors are. They are passively complicit with a lower quality of teaching, because students still get certified and this keeps customers (companies, institutions) happy and paying.
  5. Instructors can give away test answers and attempt to be entertaining during lessons so that students seeking a pass won’t complain about the lack of quality instruction.
  6. Passing all or nearly all students makes an instructor look good to the training organization they work for. This in turn, makes for happy customers because all of their people got certified.

So what do we achieve with all of this certification and check box checking?

I can’t deny that most of us students learned something of value in the course. What I do know is that we are not prepared for all the items advertised in the syllabus and we certainly don’t have the muscle memory to perform most of these techniques well.

I do know that if we had been given a practical exam with an instructor, for even 20 minutes each, most of us would have realized  that we don’t have enough practice to perform most techniques correctly. And we will likely be worse a month from now when our hazy understanding fades further still.

While I’m sure there are other organizations that do teach with more rigour, nuance, quality instruction and hands-on testing, I can see how they would feel a market squeeze from certificate factories like the class I’ve just experienced.

Remarking to an RMT and Chiropractor about my experiences, they weren’t surprised. They relayed how the best courses they’ve seen in this field are the ones arranged privately. Perhaps industry is trying to commoditize the certification of a skill that you can’t compress into a poorly run course.

The Risk

This lack of real training poses obvious problems: we have people in positions of “First Aid Responder on Duty” where the certified First Aider really doesn’t understand what to do. They won’t have the confidence or the knowledge on how to act or how to take charge. They won’t understand the context and underpinnings of the first aid treatment in their course syllabus to evaluate the unique circumstances of the situations they face.

In short, they will fail to be effective, and we are down to reliance on our emergency response services. We have a false sense of security in First Aiders certified this way, who themselves may not realize that the bar was set really low for them to pass.

Suggestions

For instructors who don’t have the best spoken English skills, such as the well intentioned Instructor who taught the class I took, I have several suggestions:

  1. Don’t use comedy jumping back and forth between the wrong thing to do and the right thing to do. With hard to decipher English, we students cannot tell what the actual proper course of action is in a given situation. We can’t decipher the intent. This creates a lot more confusion than any entertainment value intended.
  2. Have someone audit a few courses. This person will take notes of words and phrases which they and other students asked for clarification on, because of pronunciation. Compile this list and for each subsequent class, provide it as a translation handout that students can refer too (e.g. “‘blood’ may sound as if I’m saying ‘breath’, ‘AIDS’ may sound like ‘ACE’”, etc.).
  3. Use traditional slides or a PowerPoint / Keynote presentation to go through the lesson plans. This way, as protocols with lists in them are being reviewed, the visible words and correct spellings will mitigate the verbal decoding needed to make sense of the instructor’s pronunciation.

For the course structure as a whole, I have additional suggestions:

  1. FAQs: Incorporate these in each lesson. For example, I remarked while learning CPR, that my fingers would get sore, because my nails were being pressed into the casualty’s body. I then surmised we’re to lift the fingers and just use our palms for pressure. I can’t be the first student who’s asked this. If instructors captured the typical points of confusion in a lesson FAQ, we’d cover more and do it thoroughly, in the same amount of time.
  2. Written tests: Treat these seriously. No collaboration, no fixing one’s answers after they’ve handed in the test paper.
  3. Hands-on tests: Introduce these. Perhaps schedule evening slots where each student sometime within a week after the course, has a 20 minute exam appointment with the instructor. The student has to demonstrate a good subset of the skills taught.
  4. Certification Standards: Enforce the standard of education. If a student doesn’t know the material, they fail. No exceptions. They can re-take the course and study harder next time.
  5. Structure: Space out the course into smaller chunks where homework can be assigned and there’s time to read the supporting handbook (which is an excellent reference). Reading the material before the lecture will increase comprehension of the material. With the reference book for the course currently given on the day of the course, there’s no time to study it independently.

Finally, as there seems to be an incentive to race to the bottom in teaching this material to keep companies (customers) coming back, we need some regulated standards if we don’t already have them. And if we do have standards for these certifications, they need to be revisited and enforced.

Categories
Technology Tips

New Mac Setup Recommendations: 2009

Ever since I was seven, people have always asked me for computer advice. In the last few years, it’s been all about the Mac inward now due for an update.

So here’s a quick list of things I believe most new users to the Mac will find useful to incorporate into their workflow:

  1. Skype-free; and now it lets you do audio, video and remote control the other person’s computer.
  2. Evernote-basic version is free and that is fine for most people. Lets you create rich notes on your desktop and also access them with your iPhone application.
  3. Splash ID-$20 for desktop application that syncs with my phone; and $10 for the iPhone application from the AppStore.
  4. Mojo-free; lets you access your own or friends iTunes libraries for media download and streaming across the Internet.
  5. OmniFocus- about $100 for the combination of desktop and iPhone application. Just about the best task/to do organize you can get which follows the GTD system.
  6. Omni graffle- about 80 bucks for the basic version. It is a Mac user’s Visio for all things graphical shape drawing oriented.
  7. Dropbox — free for a 2 GB account; pay plans for more storage. Great for syncing your files to the cloud and across computers. Useful even if you have just one computer. It provides a backup in the cloud for your most critical files. I recommend setting it up so that your own documents folder is synced to the cloud via dropbox. It’ll have to be good with symbolic links to set this up in a clean way. Friends and family: contact me to help walk you through this.
  8. SugarSync – $25 for 10 GB a year; bigger plans available. Very much like dropbox, this is what I started out with and it doesn’t require a custom dropbox folder; it will sync arbitrary existing folders. If you use one it don’t need the other.

More to come in future updates and a broken arm heals!