Whoa...Sprint actually came through!

I'm now through a few billing cycles with Sprint after the guy at the Sprint store mucked with my account. As I posted before, I got 4 additional lines (and phones) and my bill was supposed to drop by about $20 per month. Low and behold, it actually has (it takes a few billing cycles to work out the plan changes)! So I have 4 phones sitting on the shelf doing nothing. I probably could get a few bucks more off per month (one discount I have wasn't applied to 4 lines), but I'm not going to sweat it. I would also have liked free mobile to mobile calling on all lines (there are 10 on my account and only 5 have mobile to mobile), but since we don't go over our minutes, it isn't a problem. I did have to sign up for another 2 year contract, but that's minor as I don't see switching off Sprint any time soon; coverage is good for me (and my family) and they finally have phones that I like (my wife and I have the Motorola Razr V3m). You might be asking why I have 10 lines on my account; 4 lines are idle (phones on my shelf), one used by me, 1 by my wife and the other 4 by my family members. They get a sweet deal piggybacking off my account, but I don't mind as long as we're under our allotted minutes.

For all my complaining about Sprint, this time I can really say, thanks for doing something right!

Success with Amazon affiliates

When I started ReceiptWallet back in October, I thought that it was a good idea to become an Amazon Affiliate and point people to scanners and collect a little money off the referrals. It turns out I was right. While I can't retire off the 4-6% that Amazon pays me for each sale, it's still a little money in my pocket. The DocketPORT 465 is one of the top sellers as that's a scanner I recommend for ReceiptWallet. If I could sell the DocketPORT myself, I could make a little more money, but then I'd have to deal with inventory, returns, questions, etc. One problem with the affiliate system is that if I personally buy anything, I don't get credit for it which is understandable. Oh well.

So, if you want to order from Amazon, please use the search box on this page and start your purchase so that I can afford to feed the dog :-)

Anti Spam Systems are Annoying

Recently I've had a number of customers contact me for support and when my automated system sent them confirmation, I received back a message that said I had to click a link (a challenge/response system). I have a strong objection to these systems (such as the one from SpamArrest) as they put the burden on me even though I didn't initiate the contact. After clicking the click, these systems now require me to enter a code seen in a graphic which wastes more of my time. In addition, these systems block legitimate email, such as when ordering stuff, signing up for newsletters, etc. Most people won't remember to white list every site they want to receive email from, so they'll miss email and get mad when they don't receive it. I tried a challenge/response system using procmail back in 1996 or 1997 and found that while it did reduce spam, it also almost caused me to lose important email from someone. Personally I've found that dspam is a quite effective, non-intrusive, system. When it catches spam, it quarantines it and then I look through the quarantine periodically.

Please people, stop using these stupid systems; they only cause you to lose mail and annoy me to no end. I've now put big warnings on my website that says I won't click on the links. While you might say that it isn't hard to click on a link, it is extremely annoying and I'm not going to play the game. My anti-spam system, that I've been using for about 2 years, I think, catches 95% of the spam that I get.

I don't play well with others

For years I've known that I sometimes don't work well with others; this wouldn't be much of a probably if it was every now and again, but for me it is something I have to work on all the time. I was thinking about this the other day and figured out when this started happening. It was my senior year in college when I had an internship and had to work with a QA person. This QA person had no clue about consumer software and if it didn't work right for him, it wouldn't pass. The problem with this is that he was testing from a lab where he had to dial a 9 to get an outside line where our product was targeted at the home user that just had to dial a number (the product setup a dial up networking account). So we kept having to write code to get QA to pass it. This annoyed me to no end because this person just didn't seem competent to me and actually hindered the product (he wasn't the only person that hindered it; whoever setup the deal did some poor negotiating). This wasn't my last time having to write code to get QA to get off my back.

I was OK for awhile as I dealt with people that I thought were competent, but whenever I ran into someone that I didn't think was competent, things got messy. I won't say that I'm a genius (OK, maybe I am :-)), but I'm able to think through problems very quickly and when people can't keep up or don't come to a conclusion as quickly as I do, I get frustrated and it makes me look like I'm not a team player. In addition, I have a very good memory (knock on wood), so I recall conversations, email messages, web sites I visited, etc. So if someone asks me a question that I know has been answered already and they received a copy of the answer, I'm very quick to jump on him. If I don't recall the answer or don't know the answer, I know how to quickly find the answer; something that whoever asked the question should be able to do, in most cases. The Internet is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it.

To make matters worse, I believe that every engineering project should make money (I basically learned this in college; no sense investing resources in something that is dead from the start). This point got me into trouble as well as I can't recall the number of projects I've been on where from the get go, management knew the project wouldn't make money, but continued to invest time and money into it for years.

This problem has delayed a promotion for me and many times made me want to get up and leave what I'm doing. It's a good thing I work for myself now, otherwise, I'm sure my boss would have fired me a long time ago! While I don't think I'll ever overcome this issue, I'm always working on it. I like working with the best of the best and unfortunately I don't always have that option.

The nice thing about writing my own software is that I only have one person to blame and that's me. I try to be as courteous as possible to my customers, but frankly, some people are just too clueless to use my software even if my current products are easy enough for my parents to use (my parents aren't dumb, but sometimes aren't the most computer savvy). Some customers really try my patience and in the end, sometimes they are right, but in many cases I feel like a broken record.