Tales from our World

There’s an interesting thing happening on NSLog, apparently I company called “ReputationDefender”, go around looking for your name, and sending basic form letters asking you to remove their name/comments/etc from whatever you have. So, enter this Julian fellow who hired them. They contacted Eric, and wanted the comment removed. Now, I read the comment, and it just a general comment it’s not bad or anything. I would say that it didn’t effect his reputation at all…until now…I would say he looks pretty bad. Reputation Defender is a bad idea, because like many organizations, they are just sending out stupid form letters, and not looking at the content.

Lacking a lot of online resources, here’s a good step-by-step guide to setting up your Mac (version 10.4.x) to a good LAMP dev enviroment on your Mac.

In the course of business people ask for silly things, the number one thing being is references. When someone asks for references, I normally just pack up and leave. Why? Because it shows that they are, well, stupid. If you ask me for references, do you think I’m going to give you someone who hates me? or someone that I might think wouldn’t give me a GLOWING review. I’m pretty sure, everyone else in the world follows that same logic. I’m sure even a total screw up could produce 2 - 3 people who think well of them. So, then the question is, well what do I do to check to make sure someone isn’t that “screw up person”. Well, here are a few tips, that have worked well.

1. Use Google. 9 times out of 10 you will find something, that is useful. Perhaps, a lot of well written technical articles? Or perhaps you find a lot of incoherent rage, either way that will tell you a lot about the person.

2. Ask for a client list. Who are their customers, if one of their customers is, say, AMD or Cisco, then chances are they know what they are doing. It also shows, how many customers they have.

3. Ask for an “escape clause” in the contract. Any company you want will have, or be willing to put, an escape clause in their contact. Don’t expect a “get out whenever you want”, but most companies will at least give you sometime to back out. Generally, a week or so will work, you will know right away if things are going to work out.

4. Go with you gut. As a seasoned business person, I have learned to trust “the gut”, if you think it’s not going to work out, more often than not, it won’t.

However, I do want to stress this. Take a chance with a small business, if they have their act together, then take a chance with them, small business can deliver a far superior product at a better price. Why you ask? In a nutshell; less overhead, more motivation to do well, and generally small business care greatly for their customers.

Here’s a good (if not obvious) article called “Top Ten Reasons why Proposals Fail“. While I think that they have some good point, I think that the article is misleading. There are LOTS reasons why proposals fail, and the article doesn’t touch on the psychological/pricing/etc, it is does provide good times on how to, at least technically, prepare a proposal.

Well here’s another example of what you shouldn’t do in the world of customer service. Alex is a friend and business partner of mine, and has had troubles with Ryenolds Data Recovery, and posted his log. Well, the “son” (not confirmed), posted some charming responses. I decided to chime in.

What a horrible idea, holy crap…why didn’t they just say sorry, make a phone call, and it would be done. When you run a business, sometimes you screw up, it’s life, it happens, no one is perfect. Just communicate what is up, and if you screw up just say you did. Most people will let it go, and move on. Some may get pissed off and leave (which is a good thing, because they bail on you anyway…story for another post).

I love my Mac, every computer I own is a Mac. However, my one complain is the lack of a really good mac email client. I think Mail.app, while its getting better, isn’t getting better fast enough. I’ve played with Thunderbird, and the new 2.0 beta is looking a lot better, but again, I have issues with it (e.g. you can’t use Address Book with it).

Well, now it seems that there is a new app on the block called Correo, while it is only a 0.1 release, it shows a lot of promise, and I am looking forward to watching it grow.

Holy Crap!

So, I decided to give spanning sync a try, I agree with Alex about the whole “server” thing, but that’s a topic for another discussion. Well, I made a freaking big discovery this morning, I found that spanning sync makes all your calendar entries PUBLIC!! Holy, crap!! Very Bad.

Here’s how to fix this:

1. Download your iCal to your desktop.

2. Open the file in your favorite text editor

3. Do a find and replace for PUBLIC and replace with PRIVATE.

4. Do an import back into gCal.

UPDATE: Charlie Wood (from spanningsync.com) has posted a comment to this post with his full contact information, I will post an update on this “bug” as soon as I talk with him.

Well, about 2 weeks ago, my Wii had an unfortunate encounter with a 2yr old (note: Wii’s don’t like 6 CD’s shoved in them). I sent it back to Nintendo, and when I got it back..it was a brand new Wii (minus all my virtual console games and saved game data).

Not good, so I have called Nintendo, and they were helpful, but I got a “we’ll call you back”. We’ll see what happens.