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If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
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Mediacom's Service is Horrible |
Long story short: I liked Mediacom. Never had a problem with it. Two and a half weeks ago, our Internet service died. Turns out it was a bad cable at the junction. Took them five days to get to my place to even look at it. To fix it, they laid a cable at the junction. The repairman told me that, and so I asked him to flag where the cable was so that people near it wouldn't accidentally take out our Internet. Should bury the line in a couple of days, he told me. That was a week and a half ago. My son goes out to mow the grass, and lo and behold, beneath the tall grass on top of the ground is the Internet cable. He doesn't see it and severs it with the mower. So much for flagging where the exposed cable was. I call Mediacom. It's not going to take five days - no... it's going to take them six days to get to my place to repair it. So now I'm in HyVee, using their public wifi. When I asked if they would expedite it because this was their fault for a) not flagging the exposed cable, b) not burying the cable in a reasonable time frame, they say nope - can't do it. Horrible, horrible service. ETC: So I called around and Qwest can't give me new service until 7 days from now. And then I called Internet Solver, but it was after-hours for them. Nonetheless, five minutes later, they called me back. The guy on the phone said that maybe they could get me new service in three days, but then he asked: "If the line is just cut, why not repair the line yourself?" Some people are mechanically inclined; I'm mechanically declined, I explained. "Go to Lowes, get the tools, and you'll be up and running tonight. You'd have to be a monkey to mess this up, if a severed line is the only problem." A trip to Lowe's and $50 spent on tools, a new flashlight, standing in the light rain - and an hour later, I have Internet at home again.  I'll call Internet Solver tomorrow to see if they can install to my home. If so, they won my business tonight. |
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Not for obvious reasons, though. Although that's funny too. No, I'm laughing because Breitbart handed the press its hat today. If only they'd do their jobs... And as a refresher, here's how Charlie Gibson doesn't do his job, as collected and presented by a then-Hillary Clinton supporter. |
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Over the past few weeks, I've been mulling over how 247Toolset will do reminders. What are the expectations of the admins? Their audience? How will they use it? After a lot of consideration, I determined to blend it with another feature I've had on the plate for some time, which is to create our own version of bit.ly. Toward that end, I created 247.ms. And it works great - if you go to http://247.ms/brett, for example, it will take you to this blog. Each time it's clicked, it increments the visitor count in the database so that we can tell how many times it was clicked. (It's not purely a bit.ly app, though, in that it doesn't allow people outside the network to create shortened URL's... it's just for 247Toolset's links internally.) A reminder is sometimes sent by email and sometimes by text message. This is why the short URL is important. This effort opened the door to another function we'll be releasing, which allows for text messaging to sign up or donate - or other things. You only get to new places by exploring. Exploring is fun :) |
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Or, how I like my eggs sunny-side up. Today, for the first time, I heard a trusted business associate refer to our economy as a "depression" - after calling it a "severe recession." For his part of the country, that may well be true. I know from someone else who traveled to another distant state last year to make a new life that the area to which he moved was completely distraught economically, so he couldn't get any traction there. About a year ago, we traveled to Ohio and I couldn't believe the number of strip malls with empty storefront after empty storefront. (Thank you, Mr. $4-gas-who-wants-to-tax-everything-in-sight, aka, the Incessant Golfer.) But as my friend, Duane, puts it - I'm crazy enough to run past everyone and into the burning building that is our stagnant economy. Jonathan, my development cohort in 247Toolset, hatched a brilliant marketing plan a couple of months ago. Yesterday and today, I took the first steps toward that plan. We'll likely launch the plan in a month or two. It depends on how fast we get things just so with the platform. Freedom means that I choose my own path. I believe in freedom, and I believe that Americans crave freedom. I bought the book "Adapt" the other day, and the author asserts that people want someone to lead them. Ninnies, yes - they look for a leader to lead them. And children... they do too. Everyone else - they don't want someone to tell them what to do and "protect them." They want to choose for themselves. Playing on the playground occasionally brings a skinned knee, but it's way better than sitting safely inside. People are happiest when they get to choose for themselves and enjoy the reward of their self-directed choice. Freedom... that's what I'm running for. I don't see fire in the burning building; I see brilliant sunshine. No temporary jerk politician can keep me from my fervent passion to be free. |
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From a volunteer at one of the non-profits using 247Toolset, I received this comment today: The Calendar of Events is AWESOME! So easy to use! This forwarded to me by the volunteer coordinator at the non-profit, who has been very open with suggestions and opinions.Yes! I love people who aren't afraid to speak their mind and ask for what they want. Part of the reason that it's being well-received is that he spoke his opinion and I listened intently. Just a reminder: the solution you initially give the market is likely headed in the right direction to solve the problem, but your market will tell you the exact direction it needs from you - if you'll listen. I didn't charge the non-profit anything for their requested enhancements. Instead, they're getting a platform that they increasingly love, and I'm getting a more targeted product for my market. As a result, they'll be more likely to talk about 247Toolset to others, and I'll be ready to receive those new customers with a product that better fits their needs right out of the box. I don't get people who nickel and dime for every little charge or effort. It's dumb business, and it's small thinking. It only creates distance between you and the market, and it forgets that the relationship with the customer is the most valuable asset a business owner can have - not the few added $ per hour of a transaction or two. |
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Beat Me Up, Scotty... er, Will |
 I just hired Will, who has already started communicating to me the errors and confusions he's found in 247Toolset.
Perfect. I love bugs. Or rather, I love to find bugs in my work - because it means that I'll be able to fix it and it's gone. I like working with a QA, and now especially as we're loading time zone management into 247Toolset, we'll need to have the QA test the assumptions we programmers put into it all. So it's good to have Will on board to help transport our enterprise to new places. Here's to a long and prosperous relationship. |
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 My grandfather, Jerry, was a union man, through and through. So much so that one year we got him pajamas for Christmas and because they were made in a foreign country and not union made, he took them outside and burned them. As a joke, years later, my mom made him a nice terry-cloth robe and put a tag inside the collar: MADE BY NON-UNION LABOR. He served as a union steward, hung out at the hall... my wife's Kia Sportage was not welcome in his driveway. His truck, as you see above, had a vanity plate representing him and his union. You get the picture. When he died a couple of years ago, it was because of an accident. He slipped and fell on ice in his driveway that broke his ribs and punctured and deflated one of his lungs. From there, it just got worse until he died. Through the union, he had an accidental death policy for about $10K or $20K. And when it came time to honor the policy he had through his beloved union, they fought it. Hard. And they won. They never paid out for it, and they didn't care. A few other things happened in the years prior to that showed disrespect to the union's avid fan, my grandfather. He believed in the concept - one for all, all for one. Yeah, whatever. Watching how the whole brotherhood thing went down while he was alive is actually one of the things that soured my appetite for unions. Their deep antagonism toward business owners shocked me. It was always management vs. workers, and instead of driving toward mutual respect and partnership to deliver great service to customers, the union workers who were my grandfather's friends fostered ridicule of business owners and management. Somehow, though, the entire concept of how exactly they got a job and received a paycheck in the first place never occurred to them. When it came time to finally reward his lifelong love for the union and pay out honestly on a life insurance policy, the union flipped him the bird. This caused my grandmother great angst, up through the last weeks of her life. It was a betrayal, though it didn't surprise my mother or me... it only re-affirmed the truth we knew that the union isn't at all about its workers. Workers are just tools for the union leaders to collect a fat paycheck that they don't earn. My grandfather taught me to be unafraid to put my name to my opinion. "If you don't have the backbone to sign your name to it, you shouldn't have the backbone to speak it." So there you go, Local 792. |
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