Pick And Choose And Confirm

Posted by on September 21, 2016 No comments

At work today, a co-worker made an unusual comment.  He said he missed floppy discs.  He missed them for the reason that they were self-contained “topics”.  Like, this disc will boot your computer.  This one will load a game.  This other one is a word processor.  That thought is actually going back quite a ways, before hard drives were common.  But his recollection was good, miming flipping through a box of discs, looking for the precise one you wanted or needed.

Later, I saw another (yet another) article about the death of CDs – who was buying CDs?  What kind of crazy people are doing this?  Why aren’t they gone yet?  This made me reevaluate my own situation and I found that I had this same thought earlier in the day talking about floppy discs.

A CD is a self-contained “topic”.  It’s a capsule of time in a band’s lifetime.  It’s how they were “then”.  And when you’re browsing through a collection of CDs, like flipping through floppies, you may be looking for a specific something and you stop flipping when you find it. 

This is not the same satisfaction you get when searching your hard drive, or opening your music software, or browsing your music device.  Although I didn’t think much about it back in the floppy days, that satisfaction was probably found there too.  It’s a confirmation – “I got it!” And that’s reason to celebrate.

Searching (or seeking) physical items is also a totally different mental and emotional experience.  Consider this.  You’re in the mood for some music.  You want something to pep you up.  When dealing with virtual media, you handle your choice “offline” (which sounds backwards, but hear me out).  Your thought is, “What band/album makes me feel like smashing down walls?” And then you run through your mental list of bands or albums and settle on, say, Dokken.

If you have a physical collection, you have the same desire for an album, but instead of processing the results in your head, you flip through the discs and evaluate each disc one by one, an “online” process.  “Does this album make me feel like smashing down walls?”  Maybe yes, maybe no.  And when the answer is yes, it’s a confirmation – “I got it!” and you’re hyped to start.

It’s kind of a stretch to use the floppy disc analogy with everything, because I can’t recall feeling triumphant about finding WordPerfect and saying, “Now I get to work!”  But games, or other sources of entertainment, like CDs, would be.

The point I wanted to make earlier, but now this post is bullshit-long, is that choosing a floppy or a CD is a deliberate act.  This is in contrast to any streaming or cloud service recommendations, or a random pick from a plethora of folders.

A Good Idea Made Better

Posted by on September 12, 2016 No comments

Driving to work today, I saw a dumpster truck for the disposal/moving company, College Hunks Hauling Junk.  It made me wonder how that name came to be.  Maybe the original founders were considered hunks and were in college and decided to haul junk to make money.  It makes me wonder if the founders approached other college kids and offered them a job on the premise that they would get paid for essentially working out.  You get paid and you maintain your “hunk” status.  Sounds like a win-win.

Well times have changed, so I’m going to create the next iteration of this business model.  I call it: Middle-aged Shitheads Being Crossfit-heads.  And I already have the commercial planned out.  But the pitch to the potential employees is still the same.  They can get paid while doing their ridiculous exercises.

We open the commercial with old, large, grouchy moving men slowly moving pieces of furniture from a house to a truck.  “When you’re moving, you understand that time is a crucial factor.  Why be held up when your moving company moves like a glacier?”

Switch the scene to a few thin, ripped people (men and women!) in crazy-tight spandex dashing back and forth between the truck and house with household items.  The difference is, in the true crossfit standard, the items are just chucked into the back of the truck.  You see, the focus is on speed, not quality.

The subsequent scenes reinforce the absurdity of applying crossfit to moving.  Boxes and completely unpacked articles piled up in the back of the truck; someone pitching clothes from a pile like a dog burrowing in the ground; someone struggling with a heavy item and two or three others crowded around him shouting at him to “finish it” instead of helping out; a couch being flipped end over end through the house out to the truck; gratuitous celebrations after moving a box.  You get the point.  The commercial could get lengthy.

At the end of the commercial, there would be a teaser for a sister company, Shithead Servant Services, which specializes in personal household services, like handyman (cue scene of hanging a picture with truck tire and sledgehammer), gardening (scene of “battle-roping” with hoses – or fire hoses), and carrying groceries inside (Guys looking at grocery bags in truck. “It’s at least two sets of Gurpals!”  “AUUGH!  I HATE GURPALS!!” “Oh wait, these are going to be Durkels.”  “YEAAHH!  I LOVE DURKELS!!!” Guys then hauling in all bags at once, then obviously celebrating on completion.)

I’ll be rich.

Service Standards

Posted by on September 6, 2016 No comments

It’s a new month, so I need to keep my post stats active every month – here goes nothing.  This is something I’ve mulled over for some time, but never gave it much internal analysis until recently.

Restaurant kiosks are starting to proliferate.  My reaction to them ranges from indifferent to disgust.  The first kiosk on the scene was at Chilis.  And at this place, I am indifferent to the presence of the checkout device.  I use it without any issue and I’m out.  Next up was Olive Garden.  This one irks me.  I try to pay for my meals through the waitress, and if I’m made to pay through the device, I always leave a comment that I hate using it.  The most recent arrival is at McDonalds.  This one really irritates me.  After a few interactions with these huge devices, I gave thought to my feelings.  Why do I not mind kiosks at Chilis, dislike them at Olive Garden, and hate them at McD’s?

In the Chilis/OG setup, I know that I disliked OG’s more because it cheapened the dining experience.  Go ahead and laugh that I think OG is a “dining experience”.  But it is a full service restaurant.  So is Chilis, but the atmosphere at Chilis is definitely less formal.  Go ahead and laugh that I think OG is “formal”.  Whatever.

So if I don’t mind that Chilis is informal and has kiosks, then why do I have an issue at McDs?  It sure isn’t more formal than Chilis.  I gave it a lot of thought and this is what I came up with.

At McDs, a part of my satisfaction of the meal is the service.  You can laugh and say that’s a pretty low hurdle, and you’re right.  And you’d be surprised how often it isn’t met.  Or maybe you wouldn’t.  But when it’s good, it makes things pretty awesome.  Think of it like a shitty baseball team.  You want them to win.  You know it’s a long shot – a really long shot.  But when they put up a good fight and still lose, you can still have some pride.  You know they really tried.  They’re just not good.  Doesn’t that sound like your typical McDs experience?

Oh wait, I had a better example that explains how I feel about this.  Imagine a band playing at a concert.  There’s an awesome song you want to hear because it has this really technical, difficult part in it.  Even if the band messes up the part, it’s still great.  You know they can do it (because they did it before, when they recorded the album), so you give them a pass.  Maybe they mess it up at every concert you go to, but you still love them for trying it.

Now imagine the band determines that they just can’t play the song like they did in the studio, so they decide to cut out that section.  They just don’t play it.  Yay, no more mistakes.  But you get no satisfaction out of seeing them try and maybe they’ll actually kick ass and get it right.  That would be awesome after so many times of seeing them get so close.  But, they cheated.

And that’s what McDs is doing.  They’re cheating.  They know they suck at the service part, so they’re cutting it out.  But they don’t always suck!  A lot, yes, but not always.  And I want to be there when they don’t suck – that makes it awesome.  But they’ve taken that potential away.

So now when I go to McDs (3 out of 4 of the locations I go to have kiosks now), sometimes I get a cheerful person introducing the device and how to use it, and sometimes I get nothing.  Either way, I’m in no mood to talk to a person.  That’s not what McDs wants, clearly.  And that ruins my meal.  It’s like buying food from a machine.

Currently, they are bringing the food to your table, but I expect that practice will probably stop and you’ll just get your number called and you have to pick it up.  Then they will probably just wall off the kitchen and serve you through a small window.  Maybe you won’t even see a person back there anymore.  Maybe there won’t be people there anymore.  Time will tell.

Coming Soon, Housing Crisis 2.0

Posted by on August 9, 2016 No comments

This guy I know, well, I know him because he’s the one who used to own my house, but anyway, he keeps me around to do computer work for him.  And I do it.  And I get compensated handsomely, despite me telling him I don’t really need the money.  Well, anyway, I was at his house the other night doing computer stuff and he and his GF were having a conversation in hushed tones.  But I was right there beside them, and I was the only other one in the room, so I don’t know exactly why they were talking like that.  Except, I kinda do.

But let me first say this about the guy.  He’s successful.  Quite so.  He runs his own business in a subset of an industry where there is little to no competition and he is sought out for that skill and expertise.  He’s down to earth, but at the same time, he’s got plenty of money to spend.  You name it, he’s got it.  Boat, Corvette, camper, truck, huge house on a large plot of land, huge TVs everywhere.  Just got a divorce and is swallowing multi-thousand dollar alimony payments without slowing down.  Has someone who runs over right away when he has a computer problem and pays them much more than necessary.

And he’s pretty business smart.  I mean, he has a very successful business of his own, but he also had the sense to buy the land his house was built on when it only had a couple of trailers on it.  He now rents out the trailers and that pays his mortgage and then some.  So, I guess you would say he’s a successful landlord as well.

But now, in whispers, he’s talking to his GF in front of me about an opportunity to become a house flipper.  He has heard of an opportunity to buy a distressed house and he thinks he can flip it without investing any time or effort and learn how to do it correctly.  He may be right or he may not be.  But when I hear, “I just want to be the middleman”, it kind of rubs me the wrong way.  Maybe he’s been watching too much Flip or Flop.  Maybe he’s been inspired from stories from his GF (who’s a property appraiser).  Maybe he’s just got too much cash lying around (what a problem to have). 

The thing is, experts say that when the rabble starts acting like experts, it’s time to make for the exits.  I’ve been reading stories about the increase of flipping and I’ve seen the HGTV shows that are promoting this more and more.  It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that we were here.  But here we are.  I’m going to have to get myself prepared for this.

You’re Being My Cat. Stop It.

Posted by on August 4, 2016 No comments

Sometimes at work, you will have a co-worker who calls you over to look at something they are doing and then continues to work while you are there.  Then when you go to leave, they ask about something else so you stay.  I’m sure there’s a thousand different ways people describe this – hand-holding, babysitting, whatever.  But I know what it really is and I have a name for it.

Most people would probably agree that the root cause of this behavior is insecurity.  Maybe it starts when the person doesn’t know exactly what to do, so they call someone over to make sure they do it right.  Then they need that person to stay there because they are not sure of anything else from that point onward.

There are many times when I am walking through my house that my cat intercepts my path and guides me where she wants.  You do know this is what they are doing when they get all up in your legs, right?  They want you to go somewhere and they will herd you there.  This always happens when I get home from work because that’s canned food time.  It happens other times as well.  But here’s the point.  She always takes me to her food bowl.

Why?  So she can eat.  It’s something I call, “Watch me eat!”  That’s what she wants, for me to watch her eat.  I suppose because it makes her feel safe or maybe because she’s proud of her eating abilities, who knows?  And you know who else does this?  People.  They want you to watch them eat because they’re unsure of what they’re doing or maybe they’re proud of their eating abilities.

Next time your co-worker wants you to watch them eat, just do what I do with my cat.  Walk away.  She keeps on eating, and so will your co-worker.

The In Thing Is Crap

Posted by on July 29, 2016 No comments

The place that I work at recently hired a new marketing person.  We didn’t have one before, but I guess we needed one now.  This feels a bit like my rant about the Mozilla Foundation hiring a marketing person who had to bring in enough new money to pay for himself and make the company more profitable.  But anyway, that’s not the point.

This new person has some fresh new ideas for how to market our company: videos.  You kind of have to understand the industry of our company is pretty tight.  Everyone knows who all the other players are here.  We’re not trying to break into new fields, certainly.  Yet somehow, we’re supposed to be gaining new clients.  That’s not really the point of this either.

To get more to the point, we had a day where a production team came to the offices and shot video of executives and some random videos of people pretending to work.  You know, it’s all staged, it’s not candid.  As part of the team’s visit, we were supposed to participate in a company-wide group photo.  It’s going to be so cool.  It’s going to be shot by a “drone”!!

So we’re bussed to our biggest company office and over about 20 minutes in the noontime heat (the worst time and the worst lighting to take a picture), a drone whizzed back and forth, forward and back, while we just stared at it, or talked to each other, or waved, or cheered, or whatever else the video team wanted.  It was a dull experience.  Not cool, not exciting.

It’s been about six weeks since that photoshoot and we’ve just been given a sneak peek of one of the pictures from the session.  I opened it with a lot of curiosity and immediately was underwhelmed.  There’s not a single crisp pixel in the photo.  And I’m not sure what I expected.  I mean, a drone video camera is probably 1080p (surely not 4k) which is uh, 2 megapixels?  And we know that the megapixel count is less meaningful than sensor size, so how big could a drone video camera’s sensor be?

Now a much less exciting photoshoot would have involved a rented cherry picker and a photographer shooting a quality DSLR on a tripod with a low-aperture, wide-angle lens.  That would give something a bit larger to work with.  The photo we got was 3840×2160.  Basically a 1080p video still doubled in size.  Also, the photographer could have taken a series of high-framerate shots and used software to do face swaps and prevent some of the worse headshots of some of the employees.

So, drones are big now, I get it.  It’s cool to have drone videos, sure, I agree.  Maybe having a video of one buzzing through the halls of the office could be neat, too.  But drones are not cameras.  They are not created for photo quality.  The plan to use a drone for such an important and expensive photo was poorly-conceived as best.  The result was crap, no matter how cool it was.

In Memoriam, In Advance

Posted by on July 26, 2016 No comments

I stopped by my local pool place last weekend for some chlorine.  At the checkout they had a sign stating that as of August 1st, they will no long accept credit cards – cash or check only.  I asked for more clarification, no debit cards either.  So, I give them about 2 months to live.  Definitely won’t see 2017.

This business had recently tried implementing a “cash discount” and that didn’t seem to work, because I don’t see those signs anymore.  I’m very confused as to what their logic is.  Accepting a check is probably more risky than accepting a credit card.  No one carries $500 around with them to buy a chlorine generator.  It’s unlikely businesses would set up accounts with them unless they can do monthly invoicing and hold out the net 30 terms.

I thought this would make their online sales unworkable, but a quick check shows that their website cart uses PayPal.  This raises even more questions.  Why not get a PayPal mobile card reader and use the same account for store sales and online sales?

I mean, if they are getting hammered with CC swipe fees and TX charges, they need to renegotiate.  Or they need to look at their margins.  I’ve always known that the ones paying cash were getting shafted because a store’s prices had to assume that CC fees would be included.  I’m puzzled by this in the same way I’m puzzled that gas stations can survive with Cash/Credit pricing.

But in the end, my guess is they won’t be sticking around much longer.  Here’s the important thing.  They’ve made a decision they can’t easily take back.  They may get one more transaction out of each customer (they already got mine).  But after that, customers like me aren’t going to return.  If they realize their decision has now brought the business into a death spiral and they want to start accepting credit cards again, who’s going to know?  All the former customers have written the business off.  They could put a banner out front saying “We fucked up and we accept credit cards again!” but that’s some serious crow to eat.  Maybe the banner will be “Under New Ownership!” which might invite old customers back to see if the payment options have returned.

It’s sounds like another case of small-business America dying, but sometimes that death is caused by a self-inflicted injury.

Leasing Your Life

Posted by on April 8, 2016 No comments

A couple issues came up around the same time, so of course, I feel like I need to give this consideration to see if it’s a “thing” or not.  It’s all about giving up control for various reasons.

The first item is some recent news that people who bought some home automation system called Revolv are going to find themselves out of luck soon because the company that owns them (Google, pretty sure) is shutting it down.  This is ridiculous.  How and why would you ever want such a critical device dependent on another company.  And why would they make a product that couldn’t function on its own?

This seems to be the promise, that you trust a company and they will take care of you and manage everything.  Why is this accepted?  You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a service.  Yes, that sounds correct, but I don’t think people really get it.  They purchase a physical device and think they own it, but they don’t.  It only works while you keep the subscription active.  In this specific case, the subscription cost is zero, but it can still be terminated at any time.

Along the same lines, I’ve noticed my employer is getting sucked into more and more subscription services and that bothers me.  Our time clock software runs on some other company’s web servers.  Our printers have been outsourced and are managed by an outside company.  Our wireless network is managed through some cloud-based application.  And I hear we are changing our security badge system soon.  I have a pretty good idea how that arrangement is going to be.

So, how vulnerable is my employer to downtime?  After researching the time clock system, I can’t tell if our time clocks will work if there is an internet outage or if the time clock company is down or hacked or out of business.  It’s obvious that we’re paying a monthly fee for this service, but if they go out of business, we have nothing usable.

The printers may continue to function if their company goes under, maybe not.  I don’t know how new users would be granted access to the printers.  The Wireless system is probably the same way.  If the supporting company closes up, we’d probably be frozen in time until we replaced the system.

That’s a lot of trust to be granting to multiple companies.  Gone are the days where you buy something and run it into the ground.  Now everything is subscription based with an unknown lifespan.  It’s a terrible way to live.

Music In The Valley

Posted by on March 21, 2016 No comments

Last weekend, I had a pretty productive CD run.  I think I picked up a dozen new ones.  One of the “why not” buys was a disc called “The Best of Starship”.  It was a cheap-looking CD.  Really cheap.  Like one of those compilation CDs that companies make just for some quick bucks.  It turned out to be something really different, though.

I don’t own any Starship albums, but I do know the songs pretty well from the radio.  When I put the CD in and played it, I didn’t immediately recognize the music.  After the song played a little longer, I recognized it, but something was still off.  The singer’s voice was familiar and all the notes were right, but the production of the track was different.

I looked at the album cover for clues.  In small type at the bottom was “New Recordings by the Original Artist.”  How strange.  What I was experiencing was the Uncanny Valley effect.  That effect is typically associated with robots, how people’s perception of them rises as their realism improves, then suddenly drops off as people get really creeped out by the tiny inconsistencies.  I’ve also had the same thing with software, where if the replication of an application isn’t exact, the little differences drive you crazy.  You notice all the little things.  At that point it’s better to create something entirely different.

And that was the case with this album.  It wasn’t a live album.  You know you’re getting a different sound when buying a live album.  It was a studio album, but it wasn’t like studio outtakes or demos or alternate takes.  It was just doing it again.  And it wasn’t like redoing it with the intent to improve on it, it was trying to remain faithful to the original.  But it wasn’t.  The production was much more sparse – less overdubs, less polish.  It almost sounded like a MIDI sequence plus guitars, plus the original vocalists.  It was good enough to be recognizable.

I have to say, it’s the strangest CD I’ve ever come across.  I’m torn between throwing it away because of (to borrow the uncanny valley’s terminology) the revulsion at what I was hearing or keeping it because it’s such an oddball recording.

SpamBastard–1aauto.com

Posted by on March 5, 2016 No comments

I had an application idea at one time and actually finished writing it, but ended up never doing anything with it once it was live.  It was spambastard.com and its purpose was to catch companies that would sell, lose, or otherwise mishandle your email address info.  The concept was simple.  You sign up for their site using their domain name @spambastard.com and if any email comes in with a mismatch between the FROM domain name and the TO domain name (as the username, before the @), the email address would be considered compromised.

That domain and application is long dead, but I’ve been able to replicate the same concept with my personal email domain.  That eliminates the hassle of creating a second account for every site I sign up for (one with my real email and one with a spambastard email).  To date, I’ve only had a few cases where I’ve had to take action.  Those cases are:

  • albumartexchange.com – There are many people including myself who posted on their forum and complained that they received PayPal phishing emails to their unique email address.  The website did not respond.
  • lakelandlelectric.com – That debacle was chronicled already.  The utility company did follow up with an explanation of how it happened and how the process was unfortunately legal.  They said they would push for tougher laws on keeping customer information private.  This prompted a follow-up email from the spammer who was incredulous that government would try to reduce transparency.  See, transparency is only good when it works in your favor.
  • paypal.com – This got compromised after only nine people knew of its existence.  Whether it was sold or stolen, I don’t know for sure, but I am pretty confident that some eBay seller has a compromised account and a spammer is looting their customer list.

Now we can add to the list – 1aauto.com.  I placed an order with their site in January (remember when the punks broke the mirror off my car?).  Today, I get a political email from John Kasich’s New Day For America to that email.  So I immediately send a message to 1aauto.com saying they’ve either sold or given away my info or their customer database has been hacked.  So which is it?  I got a pretty quick response.

Hello and thank you for your email.

I do apologize that you received a spam email to your account. I can assure you that your information is secure and we have not experienced any kind of hacking. We do keep our customer information confidential and secure and have several measures put in place to prevent against fraud and stolen identity.

Thank you for notifying us. We will keep tabs on this and look into what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.

So, I guess the answer is the owner sold out his customers to promote his choice of political candidate.  The fact that this happened at all negates the statement “We do keep our customer information confidential“.  As far as what they can do to prevent it from happening in the future, that’s simple.  Don’t do what you did again.

Thanks to spam law requirements, the spam email footer confirms the email address that it was sent to.  It tells me that I was added to the list on 2/24/16 via opt-in (gee, I don’t remember that), and gives me ways to unsubscribe.

There’s no sense in unsubscribing.  The email address is out in the wild and is now worthless.  Do I want to spend my life unsubscribing from every email campaign that gets that email or do I want to kill off the email?  The choice is pretty simple.

This scenario makes me pity people who only have a single email address, like @gmail.com or @outlook.com or @yahoo.com.  They don’t have the option of closing their account or changing their address.  Consider how easy it is for me, every email (except my personal email) is known to exactly one company.  Email gets compromised, only one place to change it.