Dispatches from the Trenches

Today I'm upgrading one of our clients from version 5.4 to 5.5, and as part of that upgrade, all batches in AR and AP have to be deleted or posted.

I thought they were ready before I arrived.  But when I got to the A/P Payment Batch screen, there were over 75 open payment batches, dating back to March of 2006. One was for several hundred thousand dollars!

I asked the head accountant how had they ever managed to balance their books. 

She said, "Well, Mary (name changed), who's been doing checks forever, told me that manual checks can't be posted.  You have to do journal entries to credit cash and debit A/P".  

I was astonished.  "What!?!?  You've been doing this for three years?  Didn't you think something was a little strange about that?"

"Yes I did, it's a lot of extra work, and the auditors question it every year, but everything balances".

I laughed.  "Is Mary here today?".

"No, she'll be back tomorrow"

"Well, when Mary comes in, tell her that Jay said to smack her with a wet noodle.  All you have to do is this...", and I showed the head accountant that indeed, manual checks can be posted. 

She was ecstatic at the work that would be saved.  I was silently dumfounded at all the years of lost effort.

Am I the only one who hates it when there's an Acura in the rearview mirror with its lights on?  Always way, way, way too bright.  You even have to set the mirror to night mode in the middle of the day.  Even Hummers aren't this bad.

Years ago I made the decision to replace the grass in my front and back yards with ground covers like ivy and periwinkle, mostly because I was tired of mowing.  Besides, I live in a surburban townhouse, I have more square feet of carpet to vacuum then yard to mow.

Now I'm convinced I made the right decision.  Recent studies have proven that one of the primary pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay is excess fertilizer runoff from lawns.  So, do your environment a favor, replace your lawn with something greener.

I've got a gig coming up next month playing the Star Spangled Banner at a pro baseball game, so I need to get my shoulder in shape as much as my chops (it's an old nickel-plated Holton BBb sousaphone).

Tonight I had to pick up my daughter at Walmart when her shift ended at 11 PM.  So I figured, what the heck, I'll get there around 10 PM, hang out at the end of the parking lot, and blow the heck out of the horn.  Nobody is there that time of night, what harm can I do?

It was a decent 50 minutes of practice.  I pointed away from the store at the grove of trees at the back of the lot.  Don't want to scare the customers, ya know.  There were a few horn honkers, but no big deal.  I have the same problem with honkers when I practice on the road next to my house.  Geez, doesn't anybody see sousas practicing these days?  Whatever, just smile, wave, and keep working on scales and arpeggios.

So anyway, at the end of my practice set, a random couple pulls up, and they want pictures of themselves with me and my car and my sousa.  I laugh, oblige, and tell them my stock joke "Why does my car's license plate say 'TUBA'?  Because 'SOUSAPHONE' is too many letters."  LOL, I smile for the camera.

And then, another car pulls up.  Two 20-something girls in a Toyota, and one leans out the window and asks, "How much longer is this going on?".  I reply, "Gosh, I was just practicing until my daughter got off work".  "Oh good", she says, "we could hear you over at the apartments, and it was so annoying we drove over here to see what the heck was going on". 

Oh crap...  There was an apartment complex beyond the grove of trees.

So in conclusion, the question for my fellow tubists is, where the heck can an honest, tax-paying sousa player go to practice hard?  I was joking with my daughter on the way home that I probably need to practice on the top of a mountain, but she said it would probably piss off the goats...

In classical economics, one of the problems with monopolies is arrogance.  The monopolist doesn't truly care for his customers as long as the money keeps flowing.

For nearly two decades, Cox Communications has had a near monopoly in our neighborhood for TV and internet.  It's been a near monopoly instead of a true monolopy because you can get TV via satellite, and internet via dialup.  Yeah, sure, like my family of computer geeks could live with dialup. 

In any case, I've been a customer of Cox since the first coax cable was laid.  In addition to TV and internet, Cox has phone service.  I call it the communications trifecta. With all this and DVR rentals, we've been paying over $200 a month.  And that doesn't count our Verizon cell phones.

So a year ago, in a moment of weakness, my wife listened to a Cox rep on the phone, and signed up for a year of Showtime and Movie Channel at a reduced rate.  The kicker to the deal was an early termination fee that was more than the cost of the monthly subscription.  Fine, it was just a couple of dollars a month, so I agreed to it.  

Ten days ago, since we had rarely watched any of those channels, I called Cox to cancel the service.  I had a short, friendly chat with the Cox rep, and as he processed the cancellation, he noticed that we had the trifecta with Cox.  He said he could save us a bunch of money because we had all three services.  "Cool", I said, and our conversation ended in about two minutes.

Yesterday, June 27, I received a letter from Cox, dated May 28, welcoming me to my new service plan.  It detailed how I was saving $15 a month because I had all three services, and that I had agreed to a one year service plan with an early termination fee of $180 if I did not cancel this agreement within 15 days. Excuse me?  I just received a letter that was void as soon as I received it.  I immediately called Cox, and asked for a supervisor.  I was astonished and firm, she was calm and professional, and she agreed to indicate in my account record that I would not have to pay the $180 termination fee.

So where's the irony?  An hour after I get off the phone, there's a knock on the door.  It's Verizon.  I greet the young man with the blue Verizon polo shirt.  He's selling FIOS internet service.  It's much faster than Cox, and it's $50 a month cheaper.  And, it comes with a free Netbook (MSRP $300).  I had forgotten that Verizon had been laying fiber in our neighborhood for almost a year, and that many of my neighbors had switched over, including one of my poker buddies.  "OK", I said to him after 20 seconds of his pitch, "if I sign up can I cancel?".  "Of course", he said, "in the state of Virginia it's a state law that you can cancel contracts like this".  So I signed up.  What the heck.  All it took was about 20 minutes and a conversation with that third-party company that verifies that the Verizon rep in the blue polo shirt hasn't coerced me into signing up with his company. 

But the irony gets better.  Today, Sunday, I check with my son to make sure that the switch of communication providers won't mess up his life.  No worries, his DVR recordings don't interfere with ours.  So the only issues to our transation is that my wife will need to get a Gmail account instead of a Cox account.

Then, I figure this situation would be good for a blog post.  It's classical economics at its best - competition breaking a monopoly.

I turn on my laptop, turn on the TV, login to this forum, and switch to the NASCAR race.  I type for five minutes, and the race goes black.  This is a common problem with Cox, a single digital program disappears without warning.  Fine, I switch to ESPN2 for the 2008 Poker championships.  Another five minutes, and this channel goes black. 

You have to be kidding me!  I'm writing an article about how I'm dropping my Cox service, and their service gets worse!  All other channels still work fine, but the only two channels I want to see don't work.  

Triple irony.  Goodbye, Cox, hello Verizon.

With the release of version 5.5 edition, the Customer Number change module is now free, so I'm sure there are many people taking advantage of it. 

I was at a client yesterday who had over 9000 customers and 9 years of transaction history in AR, and my tests were showing that the customer number change would take around 65 hours to complete.  Using the MSSQL profiler, I saw that the choke point was the ARPJD table, it was taking 30-35 seconds to change each customer number. 

Solution?  Add an index on IDCUST to the ARPJD table.  The 65 hours of processing time went down to 12, which meant we could run it overnight without disrupting the business.  Make sure you take the index off when you're done, it could interfere in a future upgrade.

Are you a computer geek?  I am. 

Are you not a computer geek?  My wife isn't. 

And, we both loved this book: http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/.

Get it, it's a fun read for both ends of the geek spectrum. 

I run a very tight spam filter on our company's email server.  The result is we get a handful of spam messages every day, sometimes none.  I do this using an RBL, or a Real Time Blacklist.  The good news about an RBL is that it's free, requires no maintenance, and has zero impact on the email server.  The bad news is that occasionally we'll get false rejections from clients who are emailing from their home. 

Why from their home? Tons of worldwide spam is coming out of people's homes on compromized computers.  And since 100's of computers will share a central address at an ISP, one bad PC means an entire neighborhood will be blacklisted.  But, it's not all bad news for our business when mail is falsely rejected, because my server sends a replies to the senders telling them they've been blacklisted, and to call us.  Spammers don't know what our phone number is, but real people do.  They call us, and I put their location onto the whitelist.

So anyway, when something gets through my server and into my junk mail folder, it's quite often not spam at all.  Most of the time it's ads from companies that I've bought things from before, like Dell and HP.  Junk mail for sure, but not true spam.  Which gets to the point of this post.

Last week the email in my junk folder was from Gary Reeves.  He runs a company called Artist in the Sky, and it does low-level, high-resolution aerial photography.  According to the email, his company moves from state-to-state as the seasons change, selling high-res photos of whatever you want.  I smiled when I read it.  It was a high tech version of those flyers I get stuck to my door that say "we're coming to your neighborhood next week to do gutter cleaning".

Do I personally have a need for an aerial photo of my townhouse?  Not really.  But I was so intrigued about getting a piece of junk mail from somebody that wasn't selling Viagra or Rolexes, that I clicked over to his site to check it out.    Son of a gun, this guy is legit, and the photos look pretty cool.

So why is this significant?  Remember when email was new, and it had the promise of essentially zero-cost advertising for anybody's business?  Gary Reeves is a real person, at a real company, selling real stuff.  I don't personally need his stuff, but I might have.  Guys like Gary should be able to do advertising that doesn't get automatically moved to a trash folder.  Spammers have ruined email for honest commerce.

My 16 year old son happens to be one of the few kids in his social circles with wheels. Trust me, they're not great wheels.  It's a '98 Nissan Sentra with almost 200K miles on it.  We don't know exactly how many miles because the odometer stopped working over a year ago.  But heck, they're wheels, beggars can't be choosers, and he has lots of friends.

I keep it running safely with regular oil changes (see this post), duck tape, and bi-monthly trips to Autozone.  When the headliner was falling down the other day, all it took was a staple gun and 30 staples to bang it back up again.

Since he's only in high school, I'm the one still paying the gas.  When I ask him, "Where are you going, son?", and he says "I'm giving Alex a ride to the mall", my response is "Isn't this the third time this week you gave Alex a ride to the mall?  Gas costs money, boy!".  He rolls his eyes, and leaves.

But today, I'm very proud of him.  I'm just getting home from work, he's on the way out.

"Where are you heading, boy?"

"Uhh, like, two of my friends need rides to a concert at the Patriot Center"

"Uh, huh..."

"But wait, Dad, it's OK.  They said they had 8 bucks between them, they're paying for gas."

"Good job son, drive carefully."

One of my favorite places to go several times a year is the local dump.  Oh wait, it's not called the dump anymore.  It's the Fairfax County Citizens Recycling Center at the I-66 Transfer Station Complex.  Whatever...  As long as I come back home with less than I left with, my wife is happy.

One main reason I go there is that I still change the oil in all my family's cars, not just to save $30 from Jiffy Lube, but because I like to stay in touch with my inner redneck.  There's nothing like a couple of skinned knuckles, some grease under the fingernails, and a cold beer on a hot Saturday to make you feel like a man.  Then, there's the satisfaction of pouring the old gunk into the huge vat at the dump recycling center.

But last fall, something happened there that amazed me.  The county has started what they're calling "Electric Sundays".  Once a month or so, they have special sessions for electronics recycling only.  There are a dozen or so handlers that walk right up to your vehicle and remove whatever you've piled in the trunk.  It feels like concierge service, but they probably do it because it's classified as hazardous waste, and they don't want us citizens to get mercury poisoning from our old monitors.

But the amazing part was the line to get in.  I've been going to the dump for over 20 years, and I've never seen a line this long.  Maybe that's why this company is doing such a good business these days.

Late yesterday afternoon, the smartest CPA in our company came into my office to complain about a program she was running.  This tax program had been running for five minutes with no changes on the screen, so she had pressed Ctl-Alt-Del, opened Task Manager, and seen "Not responding".  She asked me if she should press the End-Task button. 

I screamed, "WHAT!?!  You know better than that {name redacted}!  You're upgrading that program from the 2008 version to the 2009 version!  You'll mess everything up!!!"  Then I noticed she was grinning at me.  She laughed and said she just wanted to tick me off. 

So now I feel better.  Somebody has actually listened to me yelling at our clients who call me up to fix their systems, after doing exactly the same thing. Sure, I love having work to do, but they don't like getting bills when I fix their stupid mistakes.

So pay attention.  Not responding does not mean not working!  Wait a few minutes, get some lunch, smoke a cigarette, do anything but end-task until you're sure it's really not working.  And when in doubt, call somebody who can tell you what's safe to do.

I decided to clean up the utility room this weekend, and it had been so long since it had been deep cleaned I pulled out the shopvac to suck up all the dirty bits and cobwebs.  Around the dryer and under the shelves there were various pieces of loose change.  When I accidentally sucked up a dime and two pennies, I started to get more careful.

But then I thought, "Wait a minute.  Why am I wasting my time for pennies?  How many pennies would it take to fix my back if I throw it out leaning behind the dryer?".  So, for the rest of the hour, I purposefully sucked up every penny.  (I did, however, pick up nickels and larger, I'm still pretty frugal.)

So wake up, it's time for America to get over the nostalgia and take it out of circulation.  Australia did it years ago, and nobody suffered.  It costs more then an penny to make a penny, and nothing anymore costs a penny.  We could save millions of scarce tax dollars a year.

Good word choice is a key part of sales marketing strategies and political campaigns.  Picking a word with a negative (or positive) connotation can make or break a campaign.  That's why the term "credit card" should be completely eliminated.  Why?  Look at some common uses of this word.  "I'll take credit for that".  "He's a credit to his team".  "Give her credit, she's doing great".  "Credit" has only positive connotations. 

Remember the first day of accounting class?  You learn that debits are positive and credits are negative.  Accountants have it right - owning a credit card is not a positive thing, it's a negative thing.

Therefore, I propose a government-sponsored marketing blitz to rename "credit card" to "debt card".  It will undoubtedly change spending habits when people  get to the checkout and realize every time they use that debt card, they're further in the hole.  As part of this marketing blitz, to eliminate the confusion between "debt card" and "debit card", rename the latter to "cash card", which is exactly what it is.

So, the next time you're at the store and you whip out that piece of plastic, don't think credit.  Think debt.

I've lost track of how many times I've seen this at my clients.

Last week, during a bi-monthly service call, one user was complaining how badly her system was running.  I did the usual checks, her CPU wasn't working very hard, the C: drive wasn't full, and no strange programs were in memory.

But, she was running Symantec's anti-virus.  When installed, this program's default setting is to scan all files, including network files, all the time.  That's just nuts.  I know for a fact that anti-virus is running on the all her network servers, so from the start it's doing double work.  Next, you don't need to scan all files, because you can't get a virus from a text file.  And finally, you don't need to scan files on your C: drive everytime they're read, only when they created.  Just like in medicine, the focus should be the vector for the virus, and the vectors on a PC are email and the web.  Scan files that are created by these two sources of malware, and you'll be safe.

So, once I turned her settings to "Scan only local executable files upon creation", her system went from 30 seconds to open an Accpac screen to 2.