Programming extortion or poor estimating?

For a project we have at work, we needed to have some Java code written for encryption. The tool we have has example code for it, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. So, one of our developers got a quote from the company that put together the example to change the code to what I wanted as I don't know Java. The quote to modify the code was 4 hours @ $155/hour. While I don't have a problem with the hourly rate, I thought the 4 hours was utterly ridiculous as the example code was almost what we needed and the encryption libraries are already built into Java. In addition, getting $620 approved for this might have been more trouble than it was worth.

On Friday, I sat down, did some Google searches, installed NetBeans, and within an hour, I had the Java code working. Prior to this, I had never written a line of Java code. However, Java, like most languages I work with, has a very similar syntax that for my very small piece of code, was quite easy to understand.

So the high quote was one of three things. First, they might not have understood the request (I just double checked the email exchange and it seemed quite clear to me). Second, they could have been extremely poor at estimating. I've been writing software for many years now and my estimating is sometimes way off whack, but that is usually for big tasks and tasks where I'm starting from scratch, not sample code. My worst estimating that I ever did, I estimated 2 weeks (80 hours) to complete a bridge between a Mac application running as a native Intel application and a PowerPC plugin. Somehow I managed to complete this in less than 4 hours. However, I wasn't and am still not aware of any commercial shipping application that has this functionality besides what I wrote, so writing this was a complete unknown. Third, the quote could have been high because they may have thought we had no other option and when you're a monopoly, you can charge whatever you want.

Initially, I quickly jumped to the conclusion that the third option is what happened. After thinking about it and throwing out the other 2 options, I'd like to say that the 3rd option wasn't the real reason, but it is really hard to discount it.

Valuing my business

I've been a Bank of America customer for many years (I actually started with Security Pacific in 1991 which Bank of America bought). I'm in the process of moving my home loan to another bank because BofA's rates are pretty awful. As such, I lose my free "Prima Checking" account. So, I'm closing all my BofA accounts and moving them elsewhere where I don't have to worry about fees. Well, the problem with that is I also have a safe deposit box at BofA and in order to have a box, I need a BofA account.

OK, fine I'll drop my account down to the basic account (MyAccess checking) which if I don't maintain the minimum balance, it will cost me $8.95 a month. When looking online, I see that if I open a MyAccess checking account online, there is no minimum balance and no monthly fee. So, I asked BofA about it and they said I'd have to close my account and open a new one despite them being the same type of account. How is that for loyalty? This just reaffirms my decision to move all my accounts away from them. Hey, Brian Moynihan, work on customer service and stop trying to nickel and dime your loyal customers.

Time or money (or quality just isn't there)

Several months ago, my wife and I bought our son a Tonka Mighty Motorized Garbage Truck from Costco to give him for Hanukkah as he's a bit scared of the garbage truck coming down the street and we thought that this could help him. We gave him the truck last night and within 5 minutes, the lifting mechanism stopped working. My wife got new batteries as it shouldn't like the motor was dying, but that didn't help. After a few online searches, my wife saw many horrible reviews of this product with the same problem.

I told our son that I'd try to fix it after he went to sleep. Well, it has triangular shaped screws which made it a bit hard to take apart. However, a small flat head screwdriver seemed to fit and turned the screws. I disassembled the entire truck and found the problem. One of the gears wasn't firmly attached to the metal shaft. I used some super glue to glue it onto the shaft and presto, it started working again. Yeah! However, this little repair job took over 2 hours! Tonka doesn't make toys like they used to, so the $20 we spent on the toy was topped off with 2 hours of repair work making the toy a lot more expensive than $20.

Our son was delighted that his garbage truck was working again. He probably has one of the only Tonka garbage trucks that is still working. While it is still early, I'm crossing my fingers that my repair job worked.

We, as a society, keep demanding lower prices on products, but in a lot of cases are willing to accept poor quality.

Note, it appears that Tonka has licensed its name to a company called Funrise Toys. That's too bad because I always thought that Tonka trucks were well built.

Imprinting a signature in a PDF

The other day I needed to put my signature on a PDF, so I used PDFPen to do so, but noticed that I could still move the signature even after saving it and tried to use the "Merge Imprint into Page" option, but found that it didn't work either (their support confirmed that due to changes in PDFs, this feature was kind of useless and should be removed). My solution was to print out the PDF and scan it back in; my signature was definitely imprinted on the PDF as the entire PDF was a bitmap image. I kind of forgot about this until today.

I heard about the TSA document leak on the news and searched for it. Wired had a lot of information including a link to a document that explains how to properly redact information. The basic idea is to save the PDF as a multi-page TIFF, then convert the TIFF to a PDF. While PDFPen, this is easy:

• Open PDF in PDFPen.
• Add signature and other information that you don't want editable.
• Save PDF as TIFF.
• Open TIFF in PDFPen (or Preview).
• Save file as PDF.

Presto! Now the PDFPen folks just need to adds this as an option to eliminate the steps. I realize that this significantly increases the file size, but it does accomplish my goal.