Month: February 2011

“That’s no moon; it’s a space station!”

At the end of last year I wrote a check to the state of Colorado for $1.93. This was a payment for unemployment insurance which I’m required to carry as an employer. A few weeks after that, I received my check back with a note saying if I owe less than $5 for any of my unemployment payments, there’s no need to pay them. Okay, no big deal– I just saved two bucks.

Today I received a letter from the state demanding payment for that $1.93 plus 3 cents in interest which had accumulated since the due date. The letter included lots of scary language about collections and legal action. Hoo boy!

I called the unemployment office and spoke with a nice guy with Jack, who laughed along with me and told me the problem was the computer sends the collection letters, but it’s humans who send back checks which are too small. Apparently the computers and the humans are locked in some kind of eternal struggle down at the office or something. He promised he’d take care of it, so all’s well that ends well.

Two questions come to mind:

1) Perhaps this is a clever way for the state to make some additional revenue. Refuse to accept checks from businesses, and then bill them for the amount they’d already paid, plus interest. Three cents may not seem like much, but multiplied by a hundred thousand businesses across the state and you’re talking some real money.

2) What if I’d paid this $1.96 bill? Wouldn’t a human see my check and bounce it back to me because it was less than $5? Then in a few weeks a computer would notice the discrepancy and send another notice– this time for perhaps $2.00. And just because the computer was miffed, it would probably also contact a lawyer and start proceedings against me.

I was almost tempted to send in the check just to find out. Almost.

Woo hoo, I finally got Mac OS X running as a virtual machine on my Linux desktop!

I hardly ever use my ancient Mini anyway, and it’s so much more convenient to be able to boot this puppy from any computer in the house and use it right inside Linux. Now I can truly be cool like Thom and Craig, those Mac fanboys.

Seth Godin says this in his column today:

I received an email this morning from one of my clients, who had just opened an invoice for our services last month. In it, I’d billed in fractional hours as I normally do. She said:

I explained that I only bill for the time we actually spend on projects. She replied:

So yeah, it’s not about the dollars, or about the opportunity I have here to say, “Hmm, I could round up to the full hour and make a little more on the deal.” It’s about the fact that I have a loyal client who I enjoy working with, and who I know will always say great things about my company to her friends and business associates.

That’s one of many reasons I think my company has been successful.

Inkjet printers suck. Or, rather, the evil machinations of the ink manufacturers suck. No two printers use the same cartridge, and when one cartridge is deemed empty, you often have to replace the others as well. Oh, and “empty” doesn’t actually mean it’s out of ink— it means the printer has counted the number of pages you’ve printed (regardless of how much color was used) and determined that it’s time to gouge you again. Suck suck suck.

I think The Oatmeal describes it best:

But every now and then I actually need color, so I’m looking for a printer and found an interesting sidebar on Amazon:

Wow, if this magic little box can really scan at 19,200 dots per inch, it means I could scan a single postage stamp (assuming it’s one inch square) in 8-bit color and end up with an uncompressed image of 1.1 GB! Heaven help me if I need to scan a full sheet of paper– that would require a little over 100 GB. Good thing I bought a 2 TB hard drive a few weeks ago; now I can store 20 of these high-resolution scans!

Sheesh.

I enjoy Seth Godin’s musings, and today’s was particularly good:

I wonder how to best fit this into my business. I always do my best to please all of my clients, no matter how big or small they are. Although that generally keeps them happy, I agree with Seth that it means I’m sacrificing a little bit of my time that could be spent pleasing the big clients. And I don’t necessarily mean “big” in terms of money or clout, but rather “big” in their importance to my business.

Hmm.

Mmm… gigabit LAN…

Inspired by Thom, I picked up a new gigabit switch at a great price, and now my home network is humming along an order of magnitude faster than it was.

Hoo boy, it’s going to be cold tonight. Here’s what NOAA says:

That’s booger-freezing cold!