Deef's Net

This has been a weird week for me.

On the one hand, the number of mailings sent this week comes in at #7 for all time, which is not bad at all for a summer week (being closed last week certainly helped).

On the other hand, I was barely involved in any of them. I did proofreading on roughly two mailings (one of which was a postcard, so that barely counts), and I only read a few others because I happened to be walking by the staging area while they were there, and I was curious what their writers were up to. For the majority, my only involvement was putting together the invoices, and trying to suppress the “did you remember to…” urge.

This is going to take some getting used to. Over the past few years, I’ve read literally thousands of prayer letters (it’s a neat job), and my days have been more or less defined by what shows up on my work list. Monday’s the busy proofreading day, Tuesday’s the heavy output day, Wednesday-Friday show declining amounts of work and are therefore the best days for meetings, and so on.

Now, rather than doing all the work myself, my task is to make sure Kevin has everything he needs (training, supplies, background knowledge, environment, etc.) to do the work. Beyond that, which doesn’t take as long — particularly on Mondays — I need to figure out what to do with myself.

Not that there’s any shortage of other things to do, and not that I’m just twiddling my thumbs, by any means.

But my schedule is much less defined than it was even a month ago, when I was still involved in some sense with every letter, even if I wasn’t doing most of the work then, either. And I didn’t view it as being very defined even when I was doing all the work. So I need to be careful to enforce some level of discipline that isn’t being forced on me by the work itself. Otherwise, it’ll be too easy to fritter away time on things that I don’t really care about.

Loosely, I want to be dividing my available (work) time into the following main areas:

1. New product development. I have a ton of ideas of things to implement, and need to choose and create one that will help fund the creation of the others.

2. Existing product enhancement. There are areas of the mailing service that could be improved, and in some areas, there’s a lot of room for improvement. There are also a number of things that I need to change from the operator’s perspective so that Kevin doesn’t need access to some of the arcane and obscure knowledge in my head that I only know because I wrote the code that he’s using, particularly when it comes to importing mailing lists (very powerful code; not so user-friendly).

3. CCC involvement. Beyond being keeper of the checkbook, enforcer of the budget, and discoverer of really obscure financial policy oddities, I’d like to get a little more involved with people again. I miss that. Now that the class of ‘08 has graduated, I don’t really know any of the students. How time flies! I only tend to connect with a few students in a given class anyway, and it was a bit of a shock to be going to a thesis presentation for someone I clearly remember staying up all night with during C&R her freshman year, playing cards outside Mid Mass while making sure nobody ran off with the tent.

4. Infrastructure. The process of ensuring that nothing is going to break under load, that everything is reasonably secure, and that people who work for me can enjoy doing so. This is less of a pressing concern than it has been in the past, now that cash flow isn’t a nail-biting issue, but it still needs time and attention.

5. Other stuff. I want to work on some skills and areas that I haven’t given much attention in ages. More on that some other time, perhaps.

That’s what I want to be doing. Now I just need to figure out how to structure my time to be most effective in doing so. And get used to the idea of not being completely up on the missionary endeavors of several hundred people.

Here’s another in a series of postal announcements that are so far from having anything to do with my business, I feel inclined to promote them:

Day-Old Poultry

We [the postal service] revised [the Domestic Mail Manual, section] 601.9.3.2 to add day-old emu chicks to the list of poultry accepted for mailing.

So, if you’ve been chomping at the bit to send day-old emu chicks to all your friends, now you can.

If you’re not into mailing chickens, you can also pay for your P.O. Box online as of this month, rather than needing to do it in person at the post office. So don’t go saying I don’t write anything useful here. :-)

…running software remotely on a server in Texas (from New Hampshire) is faster than running it on the computer that’s in front of you…

Technically Sound has been around for five years as of today.

This would probably be a good time to reminisce about milestones and interesting things that have happened over the past years, including such things as deciding to experiment with sending prayer letters for multiple missionaries, quitting my day job less than a year later, renting various offices and houses where my main concern is the main circuit breaker’s capacity, and so on… Bootstrapping a business on roughly $200 of startup capital is such an odd thing, and there are so many stories that could be told.

If I did that, though, by the time I finished writing, it wouldn’t be “today” any more. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing I’d rather be doing, and the prospects for growth are looking really good right now.

Having a couple of trained employees, along with the lull in work during the summer, is allowing me to spend quite a lot of time planning for the future and working on a new service, both of which have been keeping me up at night, but in a good way. :-) I’m more eager than ever to be working on enhancements to the service and keeping up with growth.

Actually, that’s largely why I’ve been so scarce here. I could write on deefs.net, or I could write code. Code wins out almost every time, especially when the projects are fun to work on!

So, with that, I’m going to sign off, and maybe write a little more code or do a little more planning before I call it a night.

Happy birthday, Technically Sound!

Here’s the main reason why my file naming scheme can never be to just use the names that my customers use:

• June08prayerltr.pub
• Response Sheet.docx
• May Letter - year in review.doc
• June 2008 prayer letter postcard.pub
• june 08.pub
• June 08 PL.pub
• June, 2008.doc
• June 2008a.doc
• May_June Prayer Letter.pdf
• Update June.pdf

These are all files that I have open right now.

This is pretty common throughout a given month. If I stuck all of those in the same directory, and tried pulling up the one I needed, it would be a disaster waiting to happen, besides the fact that I’d be constantly overwriting files.

Since I’ve started, I’ve been using lastname-YYYY-MM-DD.pdf (or .doc, or .pub, or whatever), and for the past few years, I’ve been creating a new directory for each month (named YYYY-MM), which is somewhat redundant with the filename, but it works, and I could combine the directories if I needed to, without running into problems.

It has a couple of drawbacks. It breaks down at the end of each month, when some files get submitted for a mailing on the last day of the month, and more files on the first of the next. Not a big deal, but it means going back and forth between directories, or just having files in the wrong directory.

Also, last year, I started running into the problem where two people with the last name (Smith, which should be no surprise to anyone) would send letters on the same day. So, in those cases, I appended the first letter of the first name to the list (so, smithj for a fictitious John Smith).

Then, there was the family where the parents are missionaries and so is at least one of the kids, and they both submitted letters on the same day, and they have the same first initial. So much for that solution.

When I got three Smiths on the same day, it was clearly time to think up a new naming scheme.

I haven’t implemented it yet, but my current plan is to have the software create and populate one directory per customer, with a “Common Files” directory (for signature images, frequently-used response cards, etc.) and one additional directory per mailing. Then, since the computer’s doing all the work and not me, I’m also planning on having it create file system links for all of the active (and maybe recently finished) mailings in another directory, so I’ll be able to work out of the one directory, and still have an easily-accessible archive.

That should help address the fairly rare case when I’m accidentally working in the wrong month’s directory, and open last month’s letter, or something like that. It’ll also mean fewer files to sort through on a daily basis, since the server will be archiving all of the finished files out of sight.

According to Alexa, anyway, that’s my business site’s traffic ranking, compared to all the other sites in the world, as of a couple days ago. (They do admit that rankings beyond 100,000 are somewhat less reliable indicators of reality.)

Still plenty of room for growth!

I realize that February isn’t exactly the peak season for selling an air conditioner, but if you anticipate wanting one this summer, I have two that I won’t need any more, and would love to get rid of them before I move at the end of the month.

Both have been used for just one season, and are in very good condition. One is powerful enough to cool a good-sized house, and will fit in most vertical-sliding windows. The other is designed for casement windows (it’s taller and narrower than a typical window unit), and will also do a good job of cooling pretty much any size room under normal circumstances. They both run on a normal 15A 120V circuit, and have built-in digital thermometers, remotes, and timers.

Let me know if you’re interested, and we can work out a price and a pick-up time.

(If they’re not sold by then, I’ll still be interested in selling them after February 28th, but you won’t get quite as good a price.)

We’re moving, again. But not in the manner that we were originally planning.

Starting in November, our plan was to buy some land and build a house on it that would work for us, the business, and Christine’s future horses. We found the land, and put a deposit on it, but the house-building ended up not working out in our (admittedly short) timeframe, despite our builder’s original assurance that it was feasible. Fortunately, it became clear that he was being rather optimistic before we’d gone very far in the process, and we were able to back out of that plan without much financial investment.

Office Move

With that possibility off the table, the best option for my business was to lease some office space. I would’ve loved to not have to deal with that expense for a while longer yet so as to eliminate all of the business debt, but I think (now) that this is the better long-term plan.

As it turned out, the office space that worked out best for me is in the same area as the medical company where I used to work, which amuses me. It’s not the space for rent that’s directly across the road (which would have been quite something), but it’s only a couple minutes away.

That space should be big enough to last me at least three years. Since I have a three-year lease, that’ll be important. On the production side of things, it would take an incredible amount of growth (at least eightfold) before that space would become confining, assuming no major changes in my business model — I’ve left plenty of room for more and larger equipment, and upgraded the electrical to be able to handle the load. There’s also a lot more storage. It does lack a loading dock, which isn’t critical yet, but it probably would’ve been a deal-breaker if there had been any other space in the area with a dock that wasn’t an enormous warehouse (or run-down and with a rather loose definition of what constitutes a loading dock).

Once I hire a programmer or two, the space might become more problematic. In that scenario, it might be best for me to try and get some space elsewhere in the same building or the one next door, so as to provide more sound isolation than I could get in any layout where the programmer(s) is/are sharing walls with the production area. At least initially, though, I have an extra room that could very easily become an office for one or two programmers, and we can see how it works out, noise-wise. Part-time telecommuting might also be an option, or encouraging the programmers and production folks to work different hours.

Right now, the place is in the process of getting some electrical work, construction work, and painting done before I move in for the beginning of March. Everything seems to be going smoothly there (the electrical work is done, the construction’s moving along nicely, and the painting is in process), which is a welcome change from the house-building process. One of two Internet lines is already in place, the printer move is scheduled, and stuff is gradually getting moved over, so on the big move day, there shouldn’t be a whole lot to move.

(Oh, and if you happen to read a press release from the realtor about the space, don’t believe anything it says I said — I had no part in it. It’s a decent space, but the words I’m quoted as saying were completely made up, and the supposed strong points of the space were almost entirely the weak points, in my view. And the press release misspells my company name four or five times, though it does get it right once.)

Home Move

What with the office moving out of the house again, we no longer need a house anywhere near this big, so we started to look for smaller, cheaper places. Christine found some apartments that seem to be rather nicely maintained, decked out with amenities, and new (just built in 2004). We had a look at the complex, liked what we saw, and picked out one apartment design (out of four) that we wanted to pursue.

Out of the small number of apartments that met the criteria we set, one just came open, so we decided to jump on it rather than wait and hope that one would be available when our lease is up (only one of the others is even up for renewal by then, so the odds weren’t good). That’s going to mean a little more double rent than we’d like, but there’s also the chance that our current place can get re-rented early, in which case we can end that lease sooner. There was also a discount on the new lease, what with this being a slow time of year.

Since utilities are going to be quite a bit cheaper for us in the new place, we’ve decided to move there sooner rather than later, which works out to be next Saturday, i.e. even before the office gets moved.

That’s going to make for a very busy couple of weeks, though it’s not as compressed as our last move, thankfully!

One of the technical challenges involved with going from having just me doing all the customer interaction to having one or more other people doing so, is how to handle the E-Mails. As soon as more than one of us is interacting with the same customer, there’s potential for E-Mails to get missed.

For example, say Christine sends a “your letters are in the mail” E-Mail to someone, and then goes for a month-long horseback riding vacation in Ireland a few weeks later, or something like that. Two days into her vacation, that person sends a new letter, or asks a question. What happens?

If each person has their own E-Mail account, and assuming I’m not the snooping type, the question or letter gets ignored until Christine gets back, even though I’ve been here and working the whole time, presumably. That wouldn’t be good.

An alternative is to have one E-Mail account that everyone uses for all business-related mail, but that gets somewhat messy. How would we keep track of correspondence so that we’re not either repeating or contradicting each other? Searching the Sent Mail folder isn’t a good way of doing that.

A CRM package would do the trick, but every time I look at a package, it seems to be geared towards roving sales people, and centered around leads and goals. Or else it’s just overkill. My software already has a good chunk of the CRM-ish stuff that I need, and the packages haven’t sold me on the need to duplicate effort.

I could add E-Mail support into the software, and this might be a good long-term solution, but there are enough pulls on my time right now that I’d rather find a cheap or open source solution that I can mostly plug in, and give this task to someone else down the road to integrate gradually.

A Web 2.0 company called Sprout-It makes a service called Mailroom, which looks like it’ll do exactly what I want. The problem is that it’s not a downloadable product — all your mail resides on their server(s) — and while lots of people are touting the benefits of web-based services, not many are talking about the fact that if one of these services goes out of business abruptly, or if they lose a server and their backup plan isn’t up to snuff, your odds of getting your data from them aren’t exactly great.

So, that’s a non-starter for me, as much as I’d like the service otherwise. I also like using an E-Mail client for E-Mail instead of a browser — offline access can be nice, and there’s no lag.

In the end, I keep coming back to Best Practical’s RT. I used it and administered it in a past job, and got to know it fairly well during that time. I keep deciding against it, though, because of the ticket numbers in the subject line — I want to keep up the personal connection with missionaries, and an easy way to kill that would be to have a subject line like “[pls #281734] Preview Available”.

(Indeed, if you’re not logged in as an operator, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any identifying numbers on the site. There are a few in URLs, and I occasionally include shortcut URLs in E-Mails, some of which have magic numbers in them, but that’s it, and I’m generally getting rid of those when possible, too.)

Now, the reason for having ticket numbers is to let the computer file the E-Mail in the appropriate bucket, specifically so that replies to previous E-Mails get linked together. It works fairly well most of the time, but it needn’t be necessary. Computers have all sorts of processing power, and a more complex set of rules than match-to-number could be used.

The issue in the past has always been that I don’t know that RT could be easily customized to identify tickets based on other mailing-related information, especially since there have been a few major version releases since I last used it for production purposes, so I’m rather rusty on its changing internals. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to try and customize an open source product before you start using it for its intended purpose.

But, as I was chewing on the problem today, and looking through the wiki, I think I might have something that will work, and be only minimally invasive.

There are two things that need to get done:

1. Remove the tag from the outgoing subject line if the E-Mail isn’t going to an operator (or just prevent it from being generated in the first place, but I do want the tag to be on the operator E-Mails, if possible).

2. Parse incoming mail and put the tag back in before it gets to RT.

The first part is straightforward. RT is easy enough to customize, so it’s just a matter of finding the code that puts the tag in, and stopping it from doing so. Hopefully, it’ll be possible in that function to figure out who the recipient is as well, so I can selectively remove the tag. If not, I need to do this through the SMTP server, which I’m not as familiar with, and would rather not need to spend the time familiarizing myself with it right now. Or, I could just make the operators use the web interface, but I’d like to keep using my E-Mail program, as I mentioned above.

The second part has always been the sticking point, but if I send the mail through Procmail instead of funneling it directly to RT, I should be able to get Mail::Audit or something like that to modify the subject line and then pipe it to RT.

Since using Mail::Audit means using Perl, that would also mean I can use my existing libraries to pull relevant info from the database, such as, “does this person have an active mailing?” and “if so, and if the subject line is something like ‘Re: Preview Available’, pull the ticket number for that mailing from the database and stick it on the subject line”.

I’m liking this idea. I wonder if it’ll work, or if there’s something I’m missing.

This is a new one. I just called Verizon’s business sales line to see what Internet options there are for a property I’m considering, and after struggling through the voice-activated phone menu (it: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number. If you don’t know it, say ‘try another way’ or ‘new service.” me: “New service.” It: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number. If you don’t know it, say ‘try another way’ or ‘new service.” Me: “New service.” It: “Please say or enter your ten-digit number.” Me: “New service.” It: “You must enter a ten-digit number.” Me: [0]. It: “Please hold for the next available agent.”), got a new message — “due to unusually high call volume, no agent is currently available to take your call, and we are unable to put you in the queue” (paraphrased — the gist is that they’re out of circuits).

Do they really have that many people trying to order new service? Or are the customer service lines on the same system? And what’s this with a phone company running out of phone lines?

(This was shortly after calling Verizon to have my current office DSL upload speed fixed after they goofed the most recent change… again… and having to go through three different departments to get that done.)