A Voice in the Dark

I completely agree with Russ Nelson’s position on immigration.

We’re all immigrants, really. Well, most of us.

In other news, Orochimaru (code name for the dev lead on my project) thinks key - value pairs are the wrong way for two processes managed by different teams to communicate. I’m unsure how to explain my position that the simplest answer is generally correct. I don’t see a single problem that key - value pairs inherently cause. It’s a known solution to a known problem with a best current practice readily available. Why would you spend your time and effort trying to establish a complicated solution involving interfaces and contracts and schema replication?

Filed under: Notices
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I frequently try to help out small businesses who are getting their start in the hectic world of free software. They usually have a setup where you can download the software (which generally goes on a web site) free for personal use, but if you use it commercially, you have to buy a license. Frequently, the personal-use license comes with certain advertising and link requirements. Meanwhile, the commercial-use license loudly proclaims the high level of service and support you can expect.

I don’t trust marketing materials. I want you to walk your talk. So my first order of business is to ask for support in the form of a custom license before I buy.

My thinking goes like this. Right now, you don’t have my money. Provide me this special consideration, and I will give you money. That’s what we call an incentive. Once you have my money, you don’t have incentives anymore unless you continue to charge money for your service. Your level of commitment to my satisfaction will naturally and necessarily decrease after I buy my license.

So I’ll ask something like “hey, can I get a commercial-use license that has the same advertising and link requirements as the personal use license?” - and that’s frequently the only practical difference between the two. So what I’m asking is “how much of a discount will you give me for perpetual advertising?”, and I’m not particularly worried about it. What I’m trying to find out is, how much do you value your commercial customers?

A commercial customer, after all, doesn’t just have one domain. I have over a dozen. I host thirty more. If you charge $50 for a license, I’m in a good position to make you as much as $2,000 if I like your software. People also recommend software to people like themselves. Whereas Bob down the street is going to talk to Joe down the street who would get your software free for personal use, Caliban the owner of Darklock talks to Sam the owner of Aevum who would pay $50 for it. I’m a much better business opportunity than the average random dumbass who logs onto your web site.

The best possible response - the one I expect from a truly professional company - is “we’d be happy to give you that custom license, but we can’t discount the software for you”. But the response I get is almost always a demand that I explain why I want this license because it’s a stupid request.

Strike one. Don’t call your prospective customer stupid.

When I explain that I want it in the license so I don’t have to account for it specifically in the terms of sale for the site if I ever sell it, they respond that if I sell the site I shouldn’t care what the new owner does.

Strike two. Don’t tell your prospective customer how to run his business.

When I observe that this is hardly a high level of service and support, they respond that I shouldn’t expect service and support for weird things nobody else wants.

Strike three. Don’t tell your prospective customer he’s the one with the problem.

Now, as far as they’re concerned, this is $50. They don’t care. “I’m not modifying our license agreement for a lousy $50!” It doesn’t occur to them that people frequently ask me how to build web sites. It doesn’t occur to them that I personally have five other places I want to install their software. It doesn’t even cross their minds that when someone says “what do you think of this software?” I’m going to tell that person what complete jerks they were when I wanted a custom license.

And if they’d just copied and pasted one little paragraph from the free license to the commercial license, they would have had a customer. It’s thirty seconds of effort. If you won’t invest thirty seconds editing a license for $50, how can I trust you to invest four hours fixing a compatibility issue with IE7 for nothing?

I used to run a pure open source contracting firm. We damn near went bankrupt. Then I became a Microsoft partner, and the world opened up for us - doing open source work. The same clients who wanted nothing to do with a pure open source solution were perfectly happy to hire us for an open source solution after we had shown them an ASP.NET proof of concept. It was a signaling device.

So, too, are the requests I make to free software companies signaling devices. I’m not some college kid who can afford to spend three weeks configuring your product. My time is money. I won’t be the one configuring it; I’ve got someone I pay to do that. Every hour he spends doing it costs me money. If your software needs to be upgraded every week, it had better not take three hours to upgrade. If I need to ask you for support, I’d better get it, and fast. If I have to play games with you, I can’t use your software.

And that’s why you still live in your mother’s basement, even though a million people use your software and think it’s the greatest.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Open Source, Software
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I keep seeing this “above the influence” commercial where a girl’s dog lectures her about smoking weed.

I appreciate the sentiment, but we all know that just after the camera went off, the girl muttered “whoa, this is some good shit” and went to buy some more. A talking dog might freak you out, but a dope smoker probably thinks it’s pretty cool.

My favorite anti-drug commercial ever was the one where the guy was sitting around on his couch ranting that all the “just say no” stuff was bullshit, because he’s been smoking weed ever since high school, and he hasn’t changed. Then a door slams, he freaks out and starts fanning smoke out the window, an angry voice yells “did you even look for a job today?”… and he yells back “no, mom”.

Point made, I think.

Filed under: Media
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Holy crap.

Starting at 7:00 AM on Wednesday, I have been going nonstop. I just had my first opportunity to really sit down and relax. Not that I didn’t get any sleep, but it was spotty and hurried - six hours Tuesday night, five Thursday.

Friday night, twelve. I feel much better. It all averages out, really; 49 hours awake, 23 asleep. That’s about right.

The day at RDA was filled to the brim with meetings. Everything was covered. Retention was about… oh, 2%. Twenty minutes after my meeting with IT, I forgot the local admin password on my laptop. It was just way too much stuff. The most frustrating part is when I was being shown how to use the time reporting system, I hadn’t been added as a user, so the application was crashing with SQL login errors. Now I can’t seem to access the system at all, so while I’m supposed to enter my time by 8 AM EST on Monday, I can’t get there to do it. Emails have been sent, but the time zone difference and the weekend conspire to make things difficult. It’s probably something silly in my network configuration that I forgot to set.

(more…)

Filed under: Business, Economics, Microsoft, Notices, Philosophy, Security
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I just got the itinerary for my trip out to Baltimore tomorrow. It seems surreal; this weekend, I was figuring on being at Amazon this week, but then I got the frantic call Monday morning from Lan Pham, my recruiter in Maryland, saying “whatever you do, don’t go in to work today” - so I had to make a judgement call, and I think I made the right one.

Basically, I’m heading to Sea-Tac airport tomorrow at 10, where I will board a two-hour flight and head to San Francisco. Then, at 2:30, I’ll board a five-hour flight to BWI. I don’t understand why I have to go to San Francisco first, but hey. I’ll arrive in Baltimore at 10:30, pick up my car, and head to the Embassy Suites hotel on International Circle where I will add another bible to my collection.

The next morning, I’ll scoot on over to RDA’s offices, where we’ll have pretty much a full day before I head back to BWI at 6:30 to check in. The flight back to Sea-Tac is nonstop this time, and arrives at 10:15. Then I’ll collapse into bed until 5 AM, when I’ll start preparing for day 1 of my actual assignment at Microsoft. At 7:30, I’m meeting the rest of the RDA team for breakfast at the Redmond Brown Bag Cafe, and at 9:30 I sit down with the Microsoft FTE that I’ll be replacing so I can get started coming up to speed on the project.

The most distressing parts of this are the “so close and yet so far” aspect. I’ll be back in San Francisco for less than an hour; certainly not enough time to revisit some old skate spots or stroll by 18th and Castro. In Baltimore, I’ll have enough time to visit a few of the old hangouts, but I’ll probably be too tired to do so. I’m going to try and get some sleep on the longer flights, but in economy class, that’s likely to be difficult.

I was hoping I could find the time to hit Hammerjack’s, at least, but all the web links seem to be unavailable. Maybe it’s closed down. If so… end of an era, man.

Found in a web search: “It was torn down to make way for the Oriole’s new stadium way back when but it was ledgendary.” After some searching… crap… 1989? Has it been that long? I was sure I went there a few times later than that… ahh, here we go: Marilyn Manson played Hammerjack’s in 1996. On my birthday, in fact. Would have been nice to see that show. Regrets, regrets. From the description on this page, it was a stunner.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Microsoft
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As I’m going through these lists of people in my network and groups on Facebook, I’m finding that my friend requests just get more and more hysterical. I just sent this one:

“Wow! Cool hat! And the jacket’s nice, too.”

That’s just plain retarded. I’m over here cackling like one of the Weird Sisters in MacBeth, because these friend requests are just… well… stupid. It’s all so silly. “Hey, want to be my friend?” Nobody does that outside of these networks. It’s so weird, it just cracks me up.

 

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I’ve been randomly messaging people most of the night to find Facebook friends in the local area. Basically, I said “I don’t know anyone; how could I meet more people?” - and I thought “hey, I know, I’ll just browse through the regional network and make friend requests to people who seem cool!”

So how to determine whether someone is cool? I decided to judge by hair. If I like someone’s hair, I look at their profile, and if I like their profile I send them a friend request. Liking their profile comes under one of three headings.

1. This person seems intelligent, like we could have a productive discussion about meaningful topics.

2. This person seems fun, like we could have a silly discussion about pointless topics.

3. This person seems accessible, like we could have sex.

Every request comes with a personal message to the effect that I like the person’s hair - unless it’s a straight guy, because straight guys are creeped out by things like that - and thought their profile was interesting.  I’ll update at some point with how well this works. So far, I’ve scored a Latvian guy and a probably-Jewish girl with positively gorgeous eyes.

Filed under: Economics, Philosophy
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Well, after a lengthy up-in-the-air period, I’ve decided to take a position at RDA Corporation in Maryland, which means I need to get on a plane Wednesday morning so I can scoot out East to Baltimore and meet with the big boys before flying back to start work in building 86 at Microsoft. Basically, I have what amounts to a crazed 60-hour whirlwind tour of airports and office buildings lasting from Wednesday morning until Friday evening.

Good to get back to that East coast work ethic, though. I swear, people out here are just so laid back, it’s sick. They come into work at ten, leave at four, and look at me funny for wearing a tie. Hell, when I’m out East, I’ll feel underdressed for not being in a suit. It’s about time I got to work a real work-week for a change, even if it is technically only the last half of it.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft
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Amazon want me to come and work for them. They’re offering $50 an hour for six month temp to perm through a contract agency with crap benefits. There, I will personally test an important and confidential new system at the Seattle location.

RDA Corporation want me to come and work for them. They haven’t offered a salary yet, but I should get the offer letter this weekend, and it’s a permanent salaried position with excellent benefits. There, I will manage a team that tests an important and confidential system at Microsoft on the Redmond campus.

Microsoft want me to come and work for them. They also haven’t offered a salary yet, and have not indicated when that offer will arrive, but it’s a permanent salaried position with benefits marginally better than RDA’s (yes, RDA’s benefits are that good). There, I will personally design and build tools that other people will use to test systems.

I would really like to have any one of these jobs, but the front runner and probable winner is RDA, since I’m trying to drive my career in the direction of management and it’s the only one that includes management responsibility. The only question is whether their benefits are worth the difference in pay compared to Amazon; if not, I have to assign a dollar value to filling a lead role instead of a team member role, so I can make a decision.

I don’t know how to do that. How much is it worth to be the guy in charge?

Filed under: Notices
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“Register now,” says the banner at the top of the page, “and get a free list of Fortune 500 companies.”

Um… wouldn’t that pretty much be this?

I don’t get it.

Filed under: Notices
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