Month: May 2009

Haven’t blogged in awhile, but I thought that mentioning this on Facebook was too public.

What the hell happened to common courtesy? Twice today I am chagrined by the lack of courtesy shown to me by folks.

While the first is just a business call that was supposed to happen at a given time and didn’t, the second is more insidious (I don’t want to hate on the first too much because maybe he/she will drop a line tomorrow and have a really good reason).

The second.. manoman. Short version.. had a really good conversation with a dude awhile back about a project he was working on with a friend of mine. He expressed interest in hiring a couple of friends of mine, told me to give him their info and he would contact them. Days passed. nothing. I kept getting calls from my friends saying “haven’t heard back” – so I dropped an email. Silence. Waited a couple days. Called back. Nothing. Waited a week and wrote a friendly email saying “well, I guess things didn’t work out”, and wished the best. Nothing.

I met up with that friend of mine over the weekend, and relayed the story.. he said this guy was somehow concerned about my interest in his project.. and I suggested the idea of an email (now months later) to clear the air – which my friend said would be a good idea.

I sent the email.. basically saying “Sorry we got our lines crossed, I wish your project all the best” – and now, 3 days later.. nothing.

Now look.. I know that at times, folks may or may not like you, may or may not want to work with you.. but I can’t imagine a situation where I would just silently receive an olive branch and not even say thanks.. Years ago, a dear friend of mine and I lost touch and when I tried to friend her on myspace, she refused. I sent an email saying “what’s up” – and silence. Maybe she just didn’t want to be friends, and I’m okay with that.. but again.. courtesy – send an email back to say: “Thanks for the well wishes, but we’ve moved on”

Is it me? I always thought the idea was, if you get an email, generally, a response is expected. If you get a follow-up, then definitely you should respond, if only to say: “Sorry, not interested.” or “Yeah, best to you as well”.

I wonder if it is a facet of our email culture that you can skim past someone at your leisure – but I’ll be damned if, on this side, it doesn’t feel like an insult.

This coming week, I and my family will be hiking various national and state parks in and around St. George, UT. Late May is a little bit warm for the activity — high 80s, low 90s — but I think it will be fun nonetheless.

For would-be robbers, of course my mother will still be keeping guard at the house 🙂

Anybody have tidbits about particularly interesting parts of the country in and around St. George or Mesquite, NV to visit?

–Matt B.

For a long time, my club has provided free R/C flight instruction for anybody who shows up at the Jordan Modelport. Today, I decided it was finally time to write a web page showing off the fact that the Utes provide [url=http://uterc.org/node/429]free flight instruction[/url] for anyone willing to pony up $4 to get into the park on a Wednesday night.

For the technically illiterate, here’s a brief overview of what’s inside of a computer. My goal here is to give you just enough information to be dangerous, akin to a mechanic telling you what the parts of your car are, and to give you some useful jargon to throw at your computer tech and make the poor pimple-faced teenager even more confused than he already is. First off, a computer is designed to [b]store[/b], [/b]process[/b], and [b]display[/b] stuff. In order to do that, it has to be [b]kept cool[/b] and [b]provided with power[/b]. If you divide the computer into those parts, suddenly the computer starts making a lot more sense. But don’t let that deter you from jargoning up that PC tech!

KEEPING IT COOL Those fans you hear whirring? Those are to keep the system cool. Some of those fans are to keep the parts that provide power cool, too. These are called the “fans”.

JARGON ALERT: Often, if you hear a very loud grinding or whining noise from your computer, you can say it sounds like “a fan threw a bearing”, or perhaps “the bushings are worn out”, or even “the fan might be rubbing on the shroud”. These useful terms may get your PC tech to happily respond with his own anecdotes regarding the time his high-end gaming PC “blew a fan on the water-cooling rig and I couldn’t play games for DAYS”. Just nod, pretend you empathize, and let him keep working.

PROVIDE IT WITH POWER You’ve got an external power brick for your notebook that tends to get really warm, or maybe you have a desktop computer with some funky fan-grille thing in the back with a power plug in it. There’s a big power plug that connects to the wall somewhere on that thing, and this part of your computer gets REALLY WARM. This is the most likely place for SPARKS and SMOKE, and if your computer simply won’t turn on at all, make noises, beep, boop, light up, or hum, this is probably the part that is broken.

JARGON ALERT: “Looks like the PSU let the magic smoke out” or “my power brick is no longer providing regulated voltage” will get that tech on your side and keep him honest, thinking you actually know something about your PC.

STORE STUFF Inside your computer, you probably have a DVD drive and a hard drive. These two parts allow you to store information. The DVD drive is that cup-holder on the desktop box, or perhaps the little slot you slide discs into on your macbook. The hard drive, on the other hand, is where you store your stuff forever.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and since both of these parts have a substantial amount of parts whizzing past each other several thousand times a minute, they tend to get out of alignment and die horrible, crunchy, gravelly deaths. If you hear a grinding noise, or see a light flashing all the time while your computer spins an icon on the screen forever, your hard drive might be dead.

JARGON ALERT: “The drive has bad sectors” or “Could it be a head crash?” are great terms for keeping that keyboard monkey in check while he’s working on your machine. Calling your DVD or CD drive a “cup holder” is a great in-joke, and will convince that PC repairman that you are part of that tiny in-crowd who really know what is going on. Or, at least, that you finally got your hands on a chain email from 1998.

PROCESS STUFF Now, this is where it gets confusing. Most of us are used to referring to the big beige box as the “CPU”. Well, it turns out the CPU (“Central Processing Unit”) is really only one tiny part of that beige box, but it’s where most of the heavy lifting happens. This part gets REALLY HOT, and is the primary reason you have to cool your laptop down.

The “CPU” plugs into a “motherboard”, that basically is a glorified housekeeper. The motherboard has lots of little ancillary processing units that take care of all the crap your CPU is too busy to do.

JARGON ALERT: If you get a particularly old PC tech working on your system, try throwing out “Heh, heh, I wonder if the Pentium floating-point bug maybe came back” or perhaps “Maybe we could just solder a pin on this to turn it into a 486 DX2?” to get a laugh and convince him you’re one of the gang.

DISPLAY STUFF Your computer has some sort of screen that keeps you glued, watching, and probably is supposed to make sounds. If either of these stop working, you can blame your “monitor”, your “GPU” (only if you play games and the games stop working), or your “sound card”.

JARGON ALERT: “Could my GPU be sharing an interrupt with another card?” will get that PC tech haring off down red-herring road faster than you can say “Nip!”, “Pang!”, or “Nu-Wom!”.

I hope this primer has been helpful. Enjoy your new computer.

–Matt B.

So it’s time, once again, to upgrade barnson.org to a new version of Drupal. I’ll be taking things down for a few hours.

Not like I have more than a half-dozen regular readers anyway. So for you six guys out there, sorry we’re going to be down for a bit!

–Matt B.

So I had an interesting week. We’re nearing a “freeze” period at work — a period in which we’re allowed to make no major changes to the infrastructure — and that means an incredibly intense workload as everyone tries to get their changes in before the freeze arrives. Add to that, the hard drive on my web server just up and died.

Now, I wasn’t too worried about my data. I’ve made good backups and taken care of it. But I have a number of webhosting customers on my server, too — all good friends, it’s a small, low-cost, low-revenue business — who didn’t take my “keep your own backups” advice to heart. So I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off attempting to restore data from a patched-together amalgam of current database backups, legacy data, and online sync when available from the failing server.

At this point, it looks like all the domains but one are fully moved. That last one, alas, is not one for which I had a good backup, but at least I know the web developer who does.

I’ve learned some important lessons from this disaster, and hope to apply them to better serve my small customer base in the future.

Lesson 1: Never trust your customers.

They may be geniuses in their field, but they are hiring you for a reason: they don’t know how to do this stuff themselves. If they knew what was good for them, they’d be doing it. And the truth is, in any moderately technical arena, your customers don’t actually know what you’re talking about. They just know what they want, and they want you to give that to them.

Lesson 2: Be the hero.

When the shit hits the fan, customers don’t want to be told what to do. Customers want you to do it. They just want things back the way they were — or, more importantly, doing what they pay you for it to do — in as short a period as possible. They want you to step in, pick up the ball, and get things running again. Don’t waste time trying to work with them or negotiate. Just get the service back up and running as fast as you can, then tell them how it is. THEN you can negotiate the particulars. A customer is more comfortable being told “Hey, we moved, here’s your new info” than you asking them what they want in this case.

Lesson 3: Cover your ass.

Sure, you made it plain to your customer what they had to do when they signed up for the service. You were explicit in your user agreements; it really is their fault if they don’t live up to their end of the agreement. Well, cover your ass in case they screw up anyway. See rule #1: no matter what you trust your customers to do, they probably won’t do it. Or they will do it, but in the worst possible way. Or they just won’t understand what you’re asking, and will ignore the requirement until the day things fail. Just figure out every conceivable way to cover your ass, then do every one of those things that you can within your financial and time constraints. At least then you can show due diligence at doing what you didn’t need to do in the first place if by some reason you can’t hold up your end of the bargain. But you’ll still probably lose that customer. Which is what you want to avoid in the first place.

Lesson 4: Relationships won’t keep your customers.

At the end of this, I’ve simply decided to replace my vendor for web hosting service that I re-sell. The moves were painful but quick, taking place over two days. Forty-eight hours of my life later, and I have no further ties to those guys. They are getting a call on Monday to stop my service, and they can find another customer.

And that last bit is the most important. Offer a valuable service, and do it better and at lower cost than your competitors. I have most of my customers because of pre-existing relationships with them, and they trust my advice and expertise. But I won’t keep them because of that relationship; I have to keep delivering value, particularly in times of crisis like a dead hard drive.

–Matt B.

Due to repeated and increasing problems with our old web hosting provider, we’ve moved the server to a new host. Let me know if you encounter any issues as a result of the move.

–Matt B.

I ran across the following blog entry today at http://kristofcreative.posterous.com/how-would-you-fix-the-economy . Once again, utter ignorance once numbers get large enough results in a popular-sounding plan that makes absolutely no sense once you break it down.

This is from an article in the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday.The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?” I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr. President: Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ‘s economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan: There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations: 1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed. 2) They MUST buy a new American car.. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed. 3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed. It can’t get any easier than that! If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes…

If you think this would work, please tell to everyone you know. If not, please disregard.

Hell, no, I’m not going to disregard such a preposterous suggestion. It’s mathematical SUICIDE for our nation! Here’s the math using the writer’s figures: 40,000,000 population $1,000,000 per person == $4e+13 ($40,000,000,000,000)

That’s FORTY TRILLION DOLLARS, people. Do you have any idea how much money that actually is? The entire US national debt is around one-quarter of that figure. It’s like suggesting that a person earning $40,000 per year should upgrade from their $110,000 home with payments they can afford into a half-million dollar home knowing that they cannot make enough money to pay for it.

If we tried to make an apples-to-apples comparison to make the math work with a ballpark figure of $1.5Tn like we’re currently spending on the economic recovery, you do it this way.

$1,500,000,000 / 40,000,000 = $37,500 per person.

Good luck handing every American over 50 $37,500 and telling them to go retire on it. Hell, double it and try telling the average American to live on $75,000 TOTAL for the next twenty to forty years.

For perspective, the entire US national debt is around $11Tn today (actually around $6Tn once you figure in money held in trust, which is how we do it for our personal bank balances), and our entire going-into-severe-deficit-spending yearly budget is just shy of $3Tn. The interest alone at going treasury rates on such a stimulus plan would be nearly $500Bn per year. Assuming only the 40M retirees paid for this plan, and that they can earn a fabulous 10% APR by investing (HAR, HAR!) the $500K or so they have left after their spending spree, they’d be living right around the poverty line at $28,000 per year or so. If they made a more reasonable 5% per year, they are living on pretty close to zero dollars per year.

Guess we should all convert to Breatharianism then.

Stupid, stupid, stupid plan compounded by a poor understanding of large numbers. God help us if anybody tries to really push for such an idiotic, mathematically-implausible move.

Regards, Matt B.