Since then it has become a tradition – I get the same box every Valentine’s day. I’ve loved doing it, as it’s something a bit more special than a bunch of flowers. I have even put several friends and colleagues on to the service, but in the last few years as the company seems to be growing, their service and quality have begun to decrease. The last couple of boxes have been a bit off – the roses were nowhere near the quality of the earlier years, and there was less and less being included in the box, while the price was still going up. Today, however, they failed me utterly.

I ordered the box of 12 roses a week in advance, noting with dissatisfaction that only a tiny sampler of lindt chocolates was included and nothing else. I paid the extra fee to have them delivered on the day too, which their terms of service say guarantees that they will be delivered generally between 0900 and 1700 on the Sunday, but absolutely no later than 1900.

At 1840 I rang the service line and waited for 30 or 40 minutes, at which point I was put through to someone who put me on hold again to eventually tell me “the driver had just left the city”. While the city is a 25 minutes drive away from my house, it wasn’t until 2030 that there was a knock at my door.

When I answered, I was overpowered by an incredible stench from the scruffy indian delivery driver, who laughed when I asked him why the flowers were an hour and a half late according to the maximum delivery guarantee. He then demanded I sign a torn and scrunched up piece of paper that was so soggy it looked as though he’d been keeping it in his underpants. When I shut the door on him and shamefacedly presented the flowers to my wife (who was a lot more tolerant during the entire day and this debacle than was I) insult was added to injury. I neither know nor care what the driver had been doing all day, but it was obvious the expensive package I had ordered had been sitting in a van since early that morning – the roses were already well wilted, and the chocolates so melted that you couldn’t pick them up without goo running out of the wrapping.

And almost half an hour after the driver left, my hallway (which he didn’t even enter) still stinks of him. I know, I know, compared to the problems of the world it is a tiny thing, but dammit I paid very good money for both this product and the service, and I am beyond disappointed. RosesOnly will get none of my money from now on, and I will recommend against everyone I know using them.

When we stayed at the Windsor hotel, I ordered 12 roses and got a beautiful boxed package there – I will find out who their supplier was and append it to this post for future reference.

UPDATE: I did get an email back and then a follow up call from a very nice person at RosesOnly, who apologized profusely and said they’d lodged a complaint with the courier company. She offered me a full refund but also offered to send my wife 2 dozen new roses instead, which I opted for. The new roses duly arrived the next day, and were massively better quality than the Valentine’s day ones, so R was quite happy with them. I appreciate that someone at RosesOnly made things right, I guess it’s a lesson in making sure that every step of your supply chain has the same values as your business in terms of service. Still undecided as to whether I’ll go with them next year or not, we’ll see.

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PHP Black Book
**TAKEN ** MySQL (3/4 I think)
Active Server Pages 3.0 (Knox)
Core Java 2
**TAKEN ** Programming Rich Clients with Flex
**TAKEN ** The C Programming Language
Flash Remoting (OReilly)
**TAKEN ** Actionscript for Flash MX (OReilly)
Learning Perl (OReilly)
Learning Perl on Win32 (OReilly)
**TAKEN ** UML Distilled
**TAKEN ** Code Complete
Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Application Development
**TAKEN ** Oracle 8 PL/SQL Programming
**TAKEN ** Paper Prototyping

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It’s a 2 day event packed to the hilt with advanced level content and fascinating sessions.  For anyone who has wanted either a dedicated CF conference or one with more hardcore topics then this is the one.  For more details check out the website:

www.cfobjective.com.au

We’re very excited about it and really looking forward to getting it together. if you’re interested in attending or speaking or just have some ideas please join the mailing list on the website, and let us know what you think!

More details to come

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Comments in the various news articles make clear that we’re not going to see a standard flash player release on the device, but more likely something new.  Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that the browser plugin doesn’t have enough functionality built into it, so I will be interested to see where they go with this.  Obviously getting any kind of flash onto the iphone can only be good for adobe – and I can’t but think it would be good for Apple too.  While the App store has been doing well, iphone development doesn’t really seem to be going very far very fast, and I think a lot of that is due to the app store itself and to the nature of coding for the iphone.  Opening up the platform to the much larger flash platform community could see some awesome things happening.

Of course this doesn’t mean the device will become open – maybe we’ll still need to deploy flash apps through the app store, who knows.  All I care about is that there’s finally some official word that something is at least being attempted!  Here’s hoping it is seen through to fruition and that we can all start hacking flash and flex on the iphone

Source:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/31/adobe_apple_working_together_on_flash_for_iphone.html

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I was going to order one of these tomorrow – now I’ll wait.

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This is a great step, and really encouraging to see. Between this and the work being done with google analytics etc flash is becoming more and more viable for content delivery on the web.

One thing that irritates me though is the uninformed attitude about flash. I used to be in complete agreeance that flash should be removed from the web – when it was nothing more than annoying intros to websites when we were all on dialup. With the work that’s happened in the last couple of years flash is an amazing platform that is now being tailored to do the things actionscript geniuses were finding hacks for years ago – and it’s a wonderful platform for application development. Read the comments at slashdot on this story though and it gets a little frustrating. Yes there are still muppets building useless things in flash and not using it well but how is that different from any other technology? I’m of the belief that flash has made serious inroads in the developer’s mind, I’m just looking forward to when the public start seeing actual flash applications and judicious use of flash in websites as a good thing.

… beats the hell out of javascript.

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