-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.