All posts in ‘Random’

Some close friends of mine, Tom and his beautiful wife, had a baby. I don’t know the exact details, but his son – the most important thing in Tom’s life for a long time already now – was born with an extremely rare medical condition.

Today I was told my Son has no bowel left to save. They have never seen a case this bad and there is nothing they can do for him at this point. I have to learn to accept that it is likely I will lose my beautiful Son or watch him have a very tough life if he can survive on a drip. There is no more hope all there is left is to love him. I want to make sure he knows he was loved no matter how long he will be on this planet.

I’m not going to try to turn their grief into a message of inspiration and hope; I don’t have to. From the beginning, when they first suspected something was wrong, Tom’s unfailing hope, love and enlightened acceptance of life has touched everybody they know.

I am not a victim. I am a creator and I will find a way to make something good of this. I don’t know what yet but I will find it.

Tom posted the following message in reply to the outpouring of support and sympathy from friends and family – I’m going to read it every time I feel sorry for myself about anything, no matter how seemingly unfair or disastrous. All the inspirational shit people read couldn’t come close:

Thanks for the offers of help. The best way you can help me is to not waste your life and dare to live your dreams. Life is short and fragile so don’t take time for granted but use every minute to live your dream. My Son don’t have that chance but you do so honour him and don’t waste your life. I know it is scary because I have done it and am doing it every day but know that when other people are laughing and telling you, you are wrong listen for my voice because I will be there cheering for you.

Stop making excuses. Everything is energy, pain, joy, laughter, fear. It is nothing more, just energy and your choice is how you use that energy. Depression is just unused energy. Fear is our friend that never had much education or wisdom so his advice is often very bad but well meaning. Use all your emotions to drive you to do everything you dream about and you will have helped me, because that is my mission with the time I have on this planet.

Don’t be sad for me because I am lucky. My circumstances are very bad and painful at the moment but my mind is full of love so I am lucky and from pain and tears I will grow in time. Vikings never surrender.

So this is just a really small tribute to one hell of a guy and his beautiful family. A spiritual teacher, masquerading as a tall, ginger Viking, leading the way for all of us, refusing to feel sorry for himself.

Off-topic: recently spent a day walking around Cheung Chau Island, near Hong Kong. The whole place is paved, but it’s still great to explore, only a short ferry from Central pier. I took a steaming heap of photos before my camera died, and picked out a few I liked the best:

Fishing boats in the harbour

The guide book gives a suggested route – heading south and taking in as many of the touristy bits as possible. I suggest you go the opposite way, where you’ll get some fantastic views and be away from the crowds, then do the touristy route afterwards…

See the rest »

Earlier this week, we went to a painting session in a really cool art space in Causeway Bay. While sketching some ideas, I looked up and noticed I was sitting in front of a huge mirror and thought it would be poetic or something to attempt a self-portrait, in which I could see myself painting myself (painting myself):

Early attempts at recursion caused a RangeError, so I limited myself to 2 levels of depth #boom

(Click for full size)

Actually, I just thought it would look cool, although some sobering but expected family news later that night made me realise that perhaps there’s something meaningful in it, or some reason I painted it – it’s kinda like I cant really see myself. One thing’s for sure: I’m no Picasso.

Still, I think it’s important for people who spend all day writing code (and/or pushing pixels) to occasionally get away from the screen and throw some paint around, or create some art that requires tactile sensations, so we’ll definitely be doing this again.

As an aside – mixing paint is nothing like in PhotoShop, and the colours never seem to resemble hex colours. I couldn’t get my favourite colour, #BADA55, no matter how hard I tried. Luckily they had a shade of blue that matched my shirt exactly!

Hey asshole, what if I want to reply? It astounds me that in 2011, startups and companies are sending out automated emails with noreply email addresses. It basically says to the recipient:

“I’m not interested in hearing from you by email, regardless of whether email is better or easier for you. I just don’t respect you enough to take the risk that a dozen people might reply and insult me.”

What if I feel compelled to write you a message saying how much I liked your email? What if I want to give you criticism about your service?

What if I don’t want to go find your twitter account so that I can @reply you, on the off-chance that you might see it, and might actually give a crap?

This is how you look when you use ‘noreply’

Once upon a time I followed a link on Forrst to go sign up for a beta launch of a new service. To be fair, I wasn’t really very interested in it, but I wanted to show support and at least might have been pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I received, after confirming my email address:

So disappointing.

To put it into perspective, this isn’t a service that’s going to have people selling their mums just to get an invite.

For something like this, early feedback will mean the difference between hit and/or miss.

(Sorry to single you out, Paul – if you’re reading this, please understand it’s nothing personal)

The result

So I’ve given you my email address. I’ve given you the permission to contact me directly, via the medium I check more than anything (nasty habit, I know.) And this is how you repay me?

Who knows whether anybody would actually take the time to reply to your email, and who knows whether they’d even say anything useful?

Certainly not you, since you didn’t even give them the chance. By using noreply, you effectively closed a channel of communication between you and your user in the place where they’re most able to speak their mind (in a private exchange of emails), and insulted their intelligence to boot.

It’s not even just the little guys who are making this mistake – big players in the startup space are playing fast and loose with their users’ respect, too:

This is probably where it starts – hundreds of thousands of people see this email and think:

“Hey, if I use a ‘noreply’ email address, maybe people will think my service is bigger than it really is! I’ll sound clever and popular!”

An alternative

Simple. Just use a friendly address as the reply-to and sent-from field, like talktome@coolname.com or hello@app-o-matic.com or even go the Frasier route, with imlistening@superwebapp.io.

What’s that? You don’t want crazies emailing you? You’re worried about spam?

Maybe it’s time to quit the internet business and go open a second-hand shop. Or, you know, get a spam filter, set email-reply-times, and suck it up in the name of better customer service and open communication.

If you’re doing this, please stop. It’s not big or clever!

An even more bizarre example

That’s probably about enough for today (comment below if you love it or hate it.)

Just to finish up though, this one is perhaps even weirder.

Why would you use noreply@ as the reply-to email address, then put your personal email address in the body of the email? That’s just mixed messages, guy.

Like this post? Let me know at noreply@josscrowcroft.com

Some footnotes

# Some people have pointed out (fairly) that by not using noreply, you open yourself up to autoresponders and delivery failure notices. My response to that would be to go with an email address like friendlyrobot, which, when somebody replies to it, replies with a friendly helpful message explaining that nobody checks this address, and offering other addresses to contact. I believe this is what Wufoo does, and they rock.

## On HackerNews, twakefield made a great point that captures the essence of this issue: “EVERY email you send should be considered an opportunity to increase engagement with your users [...] Email should be considered another interface into your application.”

### Another HN user, evanhamilton, suggests that I amend the call-to-action of this post: “So rather than just open up your inbox to thousands of junk messages and customer inquiries that you lose in the shuffle, I’d amend your call to action: Get rid of the no-reply. Set a reply-to that goes into your support ticket system (you have one, right?). Set up rules/filters to automatically get rid of the auto-cruft and route responses to different mailings to the right place.” I can dig it.

#### Ros from CampaignMonitor expands on the message of this post in her follow-up on the CampaignMonitor blog. She goes further, indicating that an increase in replies may actually positively impact the value/importance GMail places on your messages:

‘In a recent post on the algorithm behind [the] Priority Inbox feature, [MarketingSherpa] linked to a research paper by Google, which amidst dense clusters of math, features this lucid statement: “Importance ground truth is based on how the user interacts with a mail after delivery.” [...] Or in human terms: If recipients reply to your emails, then Gmail is more likely to consider them to be important.‘

Indeed.