I enjoy the reactions I get from service techs when they come to visit. Today’s was a standard example:
Xerox guy, upon arriving: “This is the first time I’ve serviced a color printer at a house.”
Xerox guy, upon learning how long (not very long) I’ve had the printer: “Well, you may not even need the part to be replaced — they set the thresholds so low sometimes.”
Xerox guy, upon looking at the machine counter: “Wow. What do you do?”
:-)
I’m looking through Delta’s web site, and just ran across a page that lists devices that can sometimes, always, or never be used on their flights.
Fortunately for all those affected, pacemakers are on the list of electronics that can always be used. Even during takeoff and landing. :-)
Christine mentioned this evening that I should probably consider putting together some sort of advisory board. I think she’s right. Now, who should be on it? Suggestions welcome.
(Christine doesn’t want to be on it. I imagine this is at least partially a ploy to have me ask other people for input regularly, rather than continually asking her what she thinks about such and such a proposal.) :-)
Wondering how to do it? Here’s an article that I liked:
If morning people only realized the types of spiritual conversations that seem to only happen after midnight, there’d probably be fewer of them. On the other hand, I understand that there’s this super-bright moon thing that warms up the earth while I sleep, and that it’s worth seeing…
(This speaking as someone who, believe it or not, can happily go either way. I just can’t do both, and currently have the freedom to choose one over the other.)
Tuesday just took the title as the busiest day of the week for incoming letters. Monday used to hold a commanding lead, but has been slipping in recent months. Tuesday used to be the underdog, making its victory all the sweeter.
That said, if you consider that I don’t tend to work on weekends (at least on letters), Monday is still nearly twice as busy as Tuesday when you add Saturday’s and Sunday’s letters to the pile.
I received a list of addresses in a Word file over the weekend, which is a less than ideal format (Excel or CSV with lots of columns is the best, since it requires almost no parsing to move into my database). This file’s woes, however, were compounded by the fact that it had lots of headers, phone numbers, web sites, E-Mail addresses, comments, and miscellaneous formatting interspersed throughout the addresses.
Editing that sort of file by hand wouldn’t have been much fun, so I programmed rules into the parser to remove phone numbers (including various descriptors), E-Mail addresses, web sites, and certain types of comments. As a result, I only had to update about a dozen addresses, out of close to 200, by hand. Not bad. And this will be ready to go the next time I get this kind of file, which is even better.
Adding to the fun, I finally got around to starting code for the parser that looks for patterns in names and addresses. Before tonight, any time I’d get a new customer, I’d have to review every address on their mailing list. (For existing customers who sent a new mailing list, I had code in place to only show me addresses that were different, which made things pretty quick, and I just made a few updates to make it allow for minor differences.)
As of this evening, the parser will now begin to look to see if the name and address seem reasonable according to existing patterns, and only present unusual cases to me (relative to the addresses it has seen). For the same Word file above, this cut off over a third of the addresses with only a few rules. Very nice.
Cost: About three hours of programming, debugging, and testing
Gain: Between 30 seconds and two minutes saved on average per mailing list for existing customers, and about ten minutes on average per new customer (depending on the type of mailing list received in each case).
Considering that I would have spent at least half an hour making adjustments to the Word file this evening alone, that investment is going to pay off pretty quickly. :-)
I now live next to a construction site. Again. :-(
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” I’ve certainly had a wide and humorous variety of guesses as to my age at various times over the past ten years. And you wouldn’t believe how many ways you can mangle my name when pronouncing or writing it. With a name like “Steve,” though, people aren’t generally up in the air as to whether I’m a guy or a girl.
I’ve just received my fourth letter from a particular customer, who I’ve been assuming is a guy, for no particularly good reason other than the fact that the first few people I knew with that name were guys. I’m starting to get the suspicion that I’m wrong, though. This particular person doesn’t tend to include self-portraits. When I get pictures with five people and four names in the caption, though, the fifth is usually the person sending the letter, and all five are girls.
Ah well. That’s a side-effect of asking for only enough information as is necessary to get the job done, I guess. And a reminder to challenge assumptions. :-)
‘Praying for particular things’, said I, ‘always seems to me like advising God how to run the world. Wouldn’t it be wiser to assume that He knows best?’ ‘On the same principle’, said he, ‘I suppose you never ask a man next to you to pass the salt, because God knows best whether you ought to have salt or not. And I suppose you never take an umbrella, because God knows best whether you ought to be wet or dry.’ ‘That’s quite different,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see why,’ said he. ‘The odd thing is that He should let us influence the course of events at all. But since He lets us do it in one way I don’t see why He shouldn’t let us do it in the other.’ — C.S. Lewis, Scraps, in God in the Dock, p. 217.
My Excel Spreadsheet of Doom … err, of Prayer Letter Business Planning, has just transitioned into the yellow zone, which means a couple of things:
1) I’ve officially transitioned from worrying about making enough money to pay the bills to worrying about cash flow and capacity (both in terms of labor and machine duty cycles).
2) There’s a pretty good likelihood of having some very busy days at the beginning and end of each month. (This was quite true last month — nearly 10% of my customers sent a letter on the 28th, which took the title for busiest day, and March 1st tied for second place).
In terms of capacity, I’ve reconfigured my office again, to require less movement of materials between machines, and to get supplies closer to where they’ll be installed. I’m still adjusting to the new layout (no, that machine’s over here now), and I think I need to carve out some more staging space, but the new layout lets me do more things simultaneously without it being an aerobic workout, so that’s promising. I’ve also brought a new machine online, which, once it’s working properly, should provide a big boost to capacity.
I’d love to move the wall with the maps out by about four inches, but that probably wouldn’t fly. :-) (Actually, I’d like to take the wall out altogether and revel in having nearly twice as much space, but I know that wouldn’t go over well.)
