Month: March 2008

Thanks to the latest round of GPS products, I think I finally understand why so many people have a fear of technology.

For years, I was always amazed when folks always mentioned how much they hate computers because they don’t understand how to use them. What’s so hard to understand? You power on, log on, mess around with some software, figure out how to manipulate all the variables offered, and ultimately work the system. Sure, there’s a range of veritable jargon to master, but it’s all shop speak that can easily be conquered with some familiarity.

Then I got a GPS system for my birthday. Here’s what happened. I opened up the box. I took the unit into my car. I plugged the unit into the car battery. I turned on the unit. Everything was up and running without flaw within 30 seconds. The only thing I had to do was plug in an address which the GPS unit (Garmin 360i) recognized before I even finished. There was a voice that spoke to me about directions. The whole thing “just worked”. It was perfect.

That’s when I realized how complicated most consumer electronics are for people. There are many people who don’t care and don’t want variables, tweaks, hacks, configurations, add-ons, plugins, upgrades, versions, betas, optimizations, and driver modifications. They want their microwaves, refrigerators and TV sets. I open the box, plug in, hit some buttons and my food is warm. For me the “it just works” mentality has always meant, “I don’t have to download several extra .dlls and reboot four times to get the thing to sync remotely with work.” For everyone else “it just works” means “the only effort I need to put in is driving to the store and buying it.”

I realize this isn’t anything new, but until you’ve witnessed the magic of a GPS solution working without flaw, you haven’t seen the world from the eyes of people who just want to buy goods and services and never want to understand or manipulate them. I got my laptop and have already put in over 12 hours of work loading in software, taking off the pre-load crap, rebooting, defragging, cleaning the registry, etc. And I’m still not done. This is why Apple products are so appealing to the hoi polloi — they just work and everything is contained without extra effort.

February 14, as we all know, was Valentine’s Day. Those of us who are male and involved in a relationship surely spent plenty of time finding just the right gift for that special day. Lucky for our partners, March 14 — “Guy Valentine’s Day” — has a much simpler gift requirement (warning: link sometimes has provocative ad banners, nothing explicit).

So what did you get for Guy Valentine’s Day?

For anybody wondering why Utahns (and Latter-Day Saints) have so many children relative to the rest of the nation, here are a couple of illustrative quotes from the days when leaders were less concerned about public relations and saying plausibly-deniable things…

Joseph Fielding Smith: Birth control is wickedness. . . When a man and woman are married and they agree, or covenant, to limit their offspring to two or three, and practice devices to accomplish this purpose, they are guilty of iniquity which eventually must be punished.

Brigham Young: There are multitudes of pure and holy spirits waiting to take tabernacles … It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can.

Sure, times have changed. But for people wondering why Utah still has such a high birth rate… you can look right there for the answers. They are alive and well, though the current wisdom is phrased as “have as many children as you can afford”.

This year i decided that i am going to ride in the MS Bike ride. I have supported the MS society for many years since my mom has suffered with it for 20+ years now. My parents have lived on the west coast for the last 6 or so years and are huge supporters out there. During one of the MS bike rides out there last year, she was interviewed by the 24hour Fitness cycling team. Her interview is about 2/3 rds of the way through the video. Pretty cool to see her on youtube.

[Shameless Plug] As some of you know, I am participating in Bike MS: Beyond the Beltway on May 17, 2008 as a member of the Deloitte Cycling team in my mom’s honor. I am on a big fundaising drive to raise money to support reasearch to find a cure for MS. I would love it if you could take a moment a sponsor me on my ride.

Okay.. so here’s one.

I have recently wiped my laptop clean because of all the viruses and spyware.

I am using my laptop primarily for a single program which is memory intensive and can crash easily. I know virusscan prgrams can take a lot of resources and traditionally can make things crash sometimes.

BUT.. I don’t want those things again.. my friend who installed my new version of XP pro for me says I don’t need it and that windows firewall really does the trick.. claims he never gets virusses.

What’s your take? And if I do get one.. what one is the least intrusive?

I don’t get it. Why on earth are iPhones selling for 10% or more above retail on eBay? I’ve been investigating my iPhone choices, and it sure as heck looks like my best option is either a refurb iPhone from the Apple Store… or a new iPhone from the Apple Store.

As an early Christmas present back in November, my wife and I received a Mossberg 702 Plinkster .22 caliber rifle from my brother-in-law, Skippy. We went shooting, and took my children Sara (11) and Zack (9) along with us to learn the basics of gun safety and learn how fun firearms can be when used safely.

Now, Sara had some reservations about going shooting, chiefly regarding the safety of firearms. After a resolving-concerns session where we identified that her chief issue was a fear of shooting someone else, we talked about how to avoid doing that when sport shooting.

It was a great time! We took Skippy’s Ruger 1022 (a fun rifle in its own right, which is now on permanent loan to us to go plinking with our kids), our Mossberg, a 9MM handgun, a .22 handgun, and four shotguns. We shot clay pigeons, and in general had a great time.

Now, for my wife, this was the first time she’d gone shooting other than a BB gun 20 years ago, and she was having a little trouble with the pump action on the 20-gauge shotgun she was shooting. So she sat down just behind the firing line where we were standing getting ready to shoot the next pigeon, and started working the action to try to pump the next shell in.

BLAM!

The 20-gauge shotgun exploded the ground just behind the firing line and sent a massive spray of mud and shrapnel forward. A large portion bounced harmlessly off the side of an ammo can. Quite a bit more of the force was absorbed by the ground.

And, unfortunately, a substantial part of the shrapnel from the blast was absorbed by my buttocks and left calf. At first, I didn’t understand what happened, and then, slowly, my brain began to register the fact that my butt felt like it was on fire. I set down my gun (safety off, unfortunately, I was in a bit of shock) and paced back to the car, wincing.

After careful examination, I was only very slightly bloody and bruised from the incident. I have a long streak along my left butt cheek where I was grazed by some kind of sharp shrapnel, and a few blue patches from bruising.

So I’ll qualify: other than my near-death experience, it was a great time. Now that springtime is here, we need to go shooting again soon!

Dear Greg Richguy,

I had an appointment today to meet with one of your recently-minted financial advisors. We knew him before he worked for you. He was a pretty nice guy. We met in our home, told him what we wanted, and he said he’d get to work finding an appropriate product. We thought that we were going to his office today to meet with him, discuss two or three different product options, and then choose one that suits a hole in our financial planning.

What we got instead was you relentlessly attempting us to engage us in some other conversation for an hour.

Now, I’m sure that your bombastic, egotistical presentation and flagrant salesmanship impress people. Heck, it impressed me. I was really impressed with your ability to wield a tool of influence like Reciprocity with panache. I was even more impressed with your smooth deflection of my hostility toward an attempt to influence me by your explanation that you weren’t trying to influence me, and what I was actually hostile to was the truth of what you were saying.

Wow, how profound. I even told you, “that’s a question that causes me to be hostile because you’re setting me up to give the answer you want” and you deflected that into “I’m sorry you are hostile at having the lies you’ve been told about your finances debunked.”

Well, Greg, let me count the ways in which you set up influence opportunities, followed through, fell short, and were frustrated. Rather than the straight-up deal we came in there expecting, you wanted us to buy into some financial planning services. You described that I was the “owner” and the “quarterback” of my financial team, with all kinds of people with their own interests acting as the linemen keeping me from getting sacked. You, you told me, would be my “head coach” to ensure all those financial people are blocking effectively.

Listen, jackass, this ain’t a football game, and the people I hire to provide specific services on my behalf will do what I have asked them to do or they get fired and I find someone else.

You set up reciprocity nicely. I have a nervous habit: I tend to keep my hands busy when talking. Otherwise, I talk with my hands or tend to do embarrassing things like pick my nose or scratch in unacceptable places. I’ve learned that if I can quietly keep my hands busy, I avoid those embarrassments. I fiddled with the mints, bottled water, and the shiny coasters on your table.

You pointed out to me that the only intrinsic value those coasters had for you was the fact that I was entertained by one in that moment. That people mattered.

You lectured me for fifteen minutes on that topic. You stroked my ego by suggesting that I was smart. You also tried to flatter me by talking about the “two types of people in the world — consumers and producers”, suggesting that I was one of the few, the lucky, the producers.

Don’t you see this is a trick? It’s a sham? It’s purely a technique to try to exploit my reflex toward consistency and going along with what you suggest as the most personally-consistent response? It was transparent to me. That’s why I refused to answer your questions, asking you to answer them instead. You realized this tack was not working as you tried to force me to answer by saying “I can’t answer these for you”… yet the questions were manipulative, and intended only to force a false consistency on me in order to agree to have your firm be my financial advisor.

Another example. You asked me straight up: “Are you LDS?” I answered in the negative. My wife answered in the affirmative. You were taken aback by this, it seemed, and quickly mentioned that you were not religious and your wife was. You tried another tack: “Do you believe in God?” “No.” “Yes.” You then decided to address the next part of your influence campaign by asking my wife “don’t you want your children to be brought up with your values if you pass away?”

The appeal to consistency here is that you tried to position your services as the only way that my wife could appear self-consistent. If she didn’t agree, how could she possibly consider herself consistent with her desire to have her children brought up LDS? Manipulative.

Another mistake: You asked Dean if he had any cash. He produced $6.00. You took the $5 — probably his lunch money — and asked us what intrinsic value it had. I responded “Lunch” because it was lunch time, and Dean looked hungry. My wife responded something else. You showed us it had no intrinsic value by ripping it in half. We responded practically: it still had value, it could be taped up or taken to a bank which would replace it. Your point was lost for two reasons:

1. It wasn’t your money. You took Dean’s money, told him you owed him five bucks, and then destroyed his money. That makes you a bully, exploiting a subordinate.
2. Even if it was your money, I don’t want a financial advisor who values $5.00 so little as to ruin it in a demonstration. That tells me you expect to make a lot more money off of me than the paltry sum you tore in half in front of me. I want a somber financial advisor with depression-era values who prides himself on earning as much as possible for me while keeping expenses down.

Next mistake, Greg: You told me you never intend to pay off your mortgage, citing the bank’s inability to foreclose if you are meeting the terms of your agreement. My wife and I are very conservative financial thinkers, and owning an asset outright is valuable because it means that we won’t have the expense of debt in our retirement. I know you believe that this cost is irrelevant because you intend to be wealthy. I intend to be wealthy as well, but I like to have lots of safeguards and fall-back plans.

One of those is to keep my debt as low as possible. I intend to leverage it while I have it so that I can increase my assets and my cash flow, but there will come a day that I will encounter unexpected cash flow problems, and a paid-off home is one more item that will help me ride out the storm.

Unfortunately, you also proved yourself a bit of a hypocrite. You handed me a thin book and challenged me to read it. I agreed, and said it looked as if it would take about two hours. You responded by telling me that you don’t read, you just listen to audiobooks. Say what? You want me to do something you are not willing to do?

Greg, you are a loathsome person who has financial values completely different from ours. I do not care how much money you have — thought you sure liked to talk about it — nor do I care how much you are insured for, though you sure like to share that information too. Dean is a good guy, with mouths to feed at home, who is trying to make ends meet. Your attempted conversion of our conservative financial plans to meet your goals may have just cost him a customer.

It’s really OK if I never see or speak with you again.

Regards, Matthew P. Barnson Dissatisfied customer

“Hi, my name is Melissa. This message is for Matthew. It’s very important that you call me at 1-800-555-5555.”

Cryptic message. I immediately recognize the intonation, brevity of message, and urgency as that of a professional collection agent.

I’m not really familiar with these guys because of having been on the receiving end. In fact, I think I’ve been called by one once in my life, regarding a magazine subscription some years back. No, you see, I used to work for a collection agency.

I don’t talk about this experience a lot, really. Mainly because I realize now that I probably wouldn’t take a job with this kind of institution again. It was a “bank” — nominally — that specialized in sub-prime lending for non-mortgage expenses. They made loans for RVs, boats, camp trailers, and those kinds of big-ticket items.

Now, not to say they were evil. They were simply a company that knew the business they were in, and made great money at it. The fact was, they’d get a repossession agent contracted the day a bill was late, and often recover within 3 days of the late-date. Then they’d send a bill to the customer for the repossession after selling the item at auction.

It was a bit of a racket, and cut-throat. They knew who their clientèle was, and the kinds of policies they had to enforce to stay profitable. We had oceans of representatives in cube farms, most of them students at the University of Utah, calling people daily from the moment their bill came due until the check arrived.

But why on earth is such a representative calling me? I racked my brain for what on earth they could want from me. We have no debts, save that on our homes.

Then I thought hard, and realized it could be one of two things:

1. A model airplane membership catalog I ordered back in October. As many of you know, this was a tough fall and winter for me. I completely forgot about it, but just got a reminder notice in the mail. I’m doubting this is it, but kind of hoping it is. It’s not a big-ticket item, and I can pay it easily. Regardless, I need to do that tomorrow.
2. I just saw a ‘final notice’ warning from Dell regarding a replacement laptop they’d sent me. They’d cross-shipped a laptop due to an episode I’d had with mine… and I hadn’t sent the old one back yet. Holy crap! In the shuffle of all the boxes moving, I had totally spaced it. Sure enough, there’s the Dell box. We’re talking like 3 months since they replaced it for me, though. That’s bad news.
3. Some bill I didn’t know about. We don’t have any long-term debt other than our mortgages on our two homes, and those are always current (automatic payment ftw!), so that would mean it was either a utility bill of some sort or a magazine subscription… something like that. One hopes it’s that trivial.

My fear was that it would be #2: the laptop. If they turned it over to collections, yeah, I do have enough money in savings to cover that kind of bill, but “big ouch” for being forgetful.

I lost a night of sleep fretting over this call from a collections agency. I was totally worried that it would be some huge, unknown bill that would blind-side me, ruin my credit report, and disappoint my wife (who has been impressed with the interest I’ve taken in our finances since we started budgeting lately) due to some irresponsibility on my part.

So I called the collection agent back the next day. It turned out the bill was from Comcast. My credit card had apparently expired and they’d been unable to bill me on the auto-pay. They had not attempted to call, send notices regarding the late payment or anything like that… just turned it over to collections when it hit 91 days late.

I paid my twenty-seven bucks. Plus a five-dollar “processing fee” because it went to collections.

I lost a night of sleep over this?

Sorry for the spam on the site this morning. Apparently the spammers are hiring people to do their work for them, and my captchas only check if it’s a human. I don’t have a good defence against actual live people logging on and posting spam. Maybe if I had to authorize every new membership…

Anyway, I’m cleaning it up, but I have to get real work done (day job, you know!) so it may be a bit…