I have a lot of cardboard boxes that I really don’t need (even if the mountains do look impressive), but White River Junction doesn’t recycle corrugated cardboard, and it would cost a small fortune to throw them all out. I could probably burn them, but even that would take a while.
Does anyone want some or all of them, whether to recycle or use? They’re available in various shapes and sizes.
What are your New Year’s Resolutions? (Really, I want to hear them. Do tell.)
I’m working on a set for me and my business for 2006. This year, my business resolution was to be working full-time (and matching my previous job’s income) by the end of the year. I’m pleased to say it happened. I was essentially there in October, and solidly passed it in November. December has been slower, as expected, but is still well above my target income, and has been my second-best month overall.
Personally, my resolution for 2005 was to go through Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening devotional at least once per day (i.e. Morning or Evening). This was spotty until June, after which I think I only missed a couple of days through when it ended in December (I had started on December 1st instead of January 1st). Since then, I’ve been pretty haphazard, and want to get back on track (anyone have a suggestion for a good, non-foofy devotional centered on Scripture?). I also added a commitment to specific prayer starting in June, which followed the devotional in terms of effectiveness (i.e. good through the beginning of December, lousy after that).
I’ll try to post a follow-up with my actual resolutions for next year within the next week or so (remind me if I don’t). Right now, some of my thoughts for the business are:
change the business structure to an LLC, which among its benefits allows for far-easier hiring of employees, whether part-time or full-time, and separates finances more completely.
come up with and implement a disaster recovery plan that covers data, computers, and paper records. This is in progress, but hardly formal or effective right now. Also, make sure everything is covered by insurance.
get replication in place so that I can lose any one server without needing to spend more than five minutes getting all services back online. (I could setup automatic complete failover, but that comes with some risks and drawbacks that I don’t think are warranted given my uptime requirements, not to mention the time and effort involved.)
migrate from QuickBooks to SQL Ledger, or at least strongly consider it. QuickBooks has some nice features and graphs, but it doesn’t interoperate with other programs well at all (if at all), so I have to enter a lot of duplicate information, and the advertising is annoying. I didn’t spend $xxx on software just to get more advertising. They’ve also discontinued the edition of the software that I’m using, so I have no upgrade path except spending even more money.
Some of these probably should be resolutions for a given month rather than the year… And I don’t have any stated personal goals yet for the year. As I mentioned, this is still in progress.
The craze on rebates seems to have mostly died down, I think. There’s at least one exception, though! I just sent in two rebates for cell phones (one for me for $50, one for Christine for $100) that required:
If that isn’t a ploy to have as many people as possible not get their rebates, I don’t know what is. I put everything aside (except the invoice) and set an alarm in my calendar in order to remember this one. And I have an extra copy of everything on file just in case they complain (like my last cell phone company did, requiring three submissions before getting the rebate).
Kudos to Best Buy, Staples, Maxtor, and Western Digital (among others) for having a much nicer process.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
— George Weinberg
Lots of companies want you to use paperless statements, and all of them talk about how good it is for you. I have yet to see a company talk about their real reason for wanting to use paperless statements — to save them money.
Personally, I want to have the records in my files, rather than relying on some company to keep their servers accessible (sorry, I’ve worked with too many computers to have any confidence in them for this sort of thing). Not to mention the likelihood of them continuing to allow me to access them for several years after closing my account.
This has to be the worst “why paperless statements are good for you” that I’ve seen, though:
Keep your holiday gifts a surprise with Paperless Credit Card Statements.
This holiday season, let [Bank Name] help you keep that special gift a surprise. Sign up for Paperless Credit Card Statements from [Bank Name] and you can rest assured knowing that your monthly statement is stored on our secure web site accessible to you by logging in with your User ID and Password.
In terms of ridiculous commercialization of Christmas, that ranks just above the “Happy Holidays from your SSL certificate company, here are some special holiday deals just for you” that I got last night.
A while ago, I gave up on most E-Mail programs’ built-in filtering, and made up my own hodgepodge of technologies, which are doing a remarkably good job. Every now and then, some new spam variation will come out and I’ll get a few that make it to my Inbox, but it’s filtering nearly 100% (well over 99%) of them without any active maintenance on my part (yay cron!).
Every now and then, I look at my “Black” folder, usually when people tell me that they’ve sent an E-Mail that I haven’t received (not that I’ve ever had a false positive, but there’s always a first time for everything), and am increasingly amazed at the obscenities that can be included on a subject line. I can understand that 0.0001% of readers would be crazy enough to buy a domain, logo, cheap imported watch, body-enhancing drug, or think that they can get rich from a Nigerian scam, or even think that they can look at improper images of celebrities or young people without having it linked to their E-Mail address and become the target for viruses and thousands more similar and worse offers even if they don’t give up their credit card information and become victims of identity theft to boot, <taking a breath> but most of the subject lines I’m seeing these days make my eyes water just looking at them — who would even open the messages behind these obscene subject lines?
Is the goal to sell something, or is it just an attempt to ruin E-Mail for everyone? The latter would make some sense, but I apparently don’t have a good enough handle on the depravity of man if even a millionth of a percent of people would intentionally look at these messages, let alone pursue whatever’s in them.
Anyway, I remain very grateful for my mail filtering setup. Over 500 messages this week that I haven’t had to delete, purely on Bayesian filtering, never mind the blacklists or other filtering.
Have you ever considered how rare privacy is these days? Your grocery store knows more about your eating habits than you do, thanks to those discount cards, other stores can easily identify you by your credit card or checks, and online services are constantly asking for far more information than they need to provide you with service (e.g. address and telephone number for a purely online service).
An aspect of my business is that I try to provide services for missionaries without it looking like it’s me doing it — in other words, I don’t want to get in the way of a missionary’s communication with whoever his/her target audience is.
In mailing letters, it’s hard to avoid the postmark issue — letters sent using regular stamps get postmarked with the location from which they were sent, so if I have a customer in California, an observant reader can easily figure out that they’re using a letter service.
There are two ways around this: I could use stamps that don’t require a postmark (more expensive and/or more businesslike, which I also try to avoid, since the letters are from people to people, and shouldn’t look like commercial correspondence). Or, I could set up a network of people in every state to whom I would mail letters in a package, and which they would drop off at a local post office. (Not unsurprisingly, that would make Option 1 quite cheap by comparison.)
So, I live with it. I’ve only had one person who cared (and let me know about it), and there happened to be another prayer letter service in his state, so he probably signed up with them instead.
Apparently, though, there’s another way to tell that someone’s using a letter service. It would require that you receive letters from two different people using the same service, and that the same printer was used for each letter, but given that, a number of printer manufacturers (including HP and Xerox) include the printer’s serial number and other identifying information (such as the date and time the document was printed) in each and every page coming out of the printer.
So, if you’re planning some activity that you want to do anonymously (like, say, printing flyers advertising someone’s birthday and plastering them all over campus), don’t use your own printer. You might just get caught.
At 2:58 this morning, I received a message saying that the stamps-with-custom-pictures-on-them that I ordered have shipped.
This, of course, is a perfectly normal thing to do in the online business world.
Except that the stamps arrived two days ago.
Incidentally, I’m not supposed to say which company it is that has this highly useful practice of letting you know that your stamps have shipped two days after they’ve arrived, because they “will suffer material damage to their brand” or some such thing, and would sue me for such, according to their site policy. So I won’t do that. It’s not [Zazzle][http://www.zazzle.com] — I’ve been quite happy with them, and wouldn’t want anyone to think otherwise. And it’s not as though this is bad, since I did get the stamps quickly. Just somewhat-less-than-well-designed.
The letter queue is completely empty, for the first time since October.
Outstanding invoices have been mailed.
Checks have been deposited.
The books are up to date.
Every business receipt is filed.
Bills are paid through the end of the year.
My desk is cleaner than it has been since Dartmouth’s fall term started (which isn’t to say it’s clear, but it’s getting there).
There are only two small piles of miscellaneous stuff-that-defies-filing on the floor, plus one on the piano (down from about six).
I have about 30 E-Mails (business and personal) that need attention (some of which are especially overdue). That’s my next project.
Ran across this stat while looking at a plugin for Firefox:
Total Downloads: 19415 - Downloads this Week: 21250
I’m curious which laws of physics were broken to allow this. :-)
Note for next year: don’t plan on doing anything other than printing and mailing between Thanksgiving and the second week of December. In early November, get all required supplies and groceries, write any checks for bills, and queue them all up with labels for the date they need to be used/eaten/sent. Make sure the office is tidy before the regional CCC staff conference, because it’s certainly not going to get any better for a while thereafter.
I’ll be writing a few catch-up posts at some point in the hopefully-near future (reminders-to-self: latest tech support calls with HP, Pitney Bowes, and Xerox; dealing with production errors; stocking holiday paper; common mistakes found in letters; and general customer service practices). For now, here’s what should be a relatively short one.
I’m amused when people come up and introduce themselves to me, who I’ve known for months (or longer) through sending letters for them or through casual interaction. It’s happened a number of times in the past few months. I can understand it — we’ve generally never talked in person, and people are, in general, not good at remembering names and faces — but I’m not sure exactly how the interaction should work:
Person: “Hi, I’m Jane Doe.”
Me: “Yes, I know, I’ve been sending your letters for almost a year now.”
Or,
Person: “Hi, my name is John Smith, and I’m on staff with CCC at such-and-such university.”
Me: “Hi John. Yes, we’ve officially met before, two years ago, and have been working together (albeit largely indirectly) for about three years now (yes, you were still a student at the time). Congratulations on your marriage, by the way!” (I’m not a stalker. Really.)
Neither of these works, so while that’s been what’s gone through my head, I usually just end up saying, “Hi Jane/John,” and leave it at that.
Any suggestions on how I can say “yes, I know who you are” without it being awkward? Probably something like “Hi, it’s good to see you in person rather than over E-Mail” or something like that would work for the first case, but I’m not sure about the second one.
On a related note, I wonder at what point I won’t be able to remember general details about each of my customers… At this point, I’m pretty sure I would recognize every name, know where roughly 90% of them are, and recall a fair amount of detail for anyone who sends letters monthly or bimonthly.
I try to memorize pictures when I can as well (i.e. when there’s a reasonable labeled close-up in a letter), so that I can recognize them if I run into them at a conference (or, as happened once this summer, be able to recall their last name upon having been given the first).
There are a few people for whom I couldn’t give more than a name and general area of the country (if in the US), but that’s generally when I get a clump of new customers in a short period of time. That should change as they send more letters.
Other than memorizing the pictures, though, I’m really not working hard at it. I’m very interested in what these missionaries are doing, so remembering the details comes easily with that. But I wonder if there’s a limit, after which they’ll start to blend together…
