Category Archives: OCD

Art

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The walls in our room are bare, and it’s starting to get to me. Some ideas:

What prints do you recommend? I think I need to get a half-dozen or so.

Businesses

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I have a lot of business ideas that are extremely well-thought-out and that would almost certainly be great. These aren’t them. These are kind of vague ideas. But I think that they could be very successful, too. The reason I propose them isn’t because I want to make a lot of money with them, it’s because I wish these businesses existed. (So feel free to steal these ideas!) * A bank that doesn’t charge its customers fees. In my opinion, the bank should be happy I keep my money there. I have a lot of choices. In return for me keeping my money there, they pay me interest. That’s how it should work, as opposed to, “In return for me keeping my money there, they charge me fees.” If I overdraw my checking account, it doesn’t cost you anything to cover it with money from my savings account. That annoys me. Charge me $2.50 if you want, but don’t charge me $35. And pay me decent interest. I can get 4.25% at ING, and am seriously considering moving some money over there. Why would you even bother paying me 0.25% interest? You can charge non-customers a fee for using your ATMs, but if I’m your customer, you’d better not charge me. And if I use someone else’s ATM, they can charge me, but you can’t! (I don’t understand that one at all: if I use someone else’s ATM, I’m already angry that you don’t have an ATM in the area. Put one up, or cover my ATM surcharge if you want to do something. But charging me?!) * An honest car dealership with fixed prices. You might see a car for $24,567 at the competition. We might have it for $21,500. You can come walk onto our lot, write us a check for $21,500 and drive away in it. We won’t spring extra charges on you at the end–it’ll all be included in that $21,500. But you also can’t get us to go down on price: it’s a fixed $21,500, just like the price of a TV in BestBuy would be. We won’t try to pressure you into buying anything. When we copy your drivers license while you go for a test drive, we won’t secretly run a credit check. (Is that even legal?) Where would you rather shop? Unless you’re a skilled haggler, probably at the place that just has one fair price upfront. * Kind of bizarre, but a place that will come pick up dirty things, wash them, and redeliver them. Originally I thought about laundry, although you’d have to undercut on-campus laundry for it to be worth it for me. But then again I might pay slightly more if you’d wash my clothes (and do it well!) and bring them back folded and everything. Probably not more than $10 for a week’s worth of laundry, though. But last night I noticed that the dishes had again piled up in our sink, and got to thinking… We have no dishwasher. Not only is it a pain to wash them all, but they’d be much cleaner if they were cleaned in a dishwasher. Imagine if, when you came to pick up my laundry, you took the dirty dishes too, and brought me clean laundry and clean dishes later in the day. * A free recycling pickup service, or a trash-and-recycling service that discounts for recycling. I recycle everything in NH, just because, well, why not? Here, I can get 5 cents a bottle if I take it to a redemption center, but I never have. I don’t even know where I’d go. Recycling facilities exist, so I can still recycle things, but when I buy drinks here, I’m paying the bottle deposit! Imagine how much you could make if you had a ‘garbage truck’ that just picked up cans on college campus. Probably at least enough to pay for gas + someone to drive it and pick everything up. I want to feel like I’m getting my bottle deposits back. So why not have a trash pickup service that discounts if you recycle with them, too? The first two businesses are the better ones, I think. Both would be best if they had fairly low margins, but I think they could make a killing on volume. In this situation, it is better to consult with the lawyers for business owners in GA for any options to develop the business. If a bank opened up that paid you, say, 2% interest on

any money you had in your account and didn’t spring unexpected fees on you, wouldn’t you consider switching? (2% interest is moderate.) And if I were to buy a car, especially having never done it on my own, I’d feel much better going to a place that just had one price, as opposed to trying to bargain over a price. (The other element is that the sales staff would be honest, friendly, and helpful.) The last two are more of a stretch. There’s considerable expense in picking things up, and laundromats probably don’t make a killing anyway. A pick-up laundry service may not be profitable, and I don’t know if there’s really much demand for pick-up dishwashing. And the recycling bit was just more of a vague suggestion. But if any of these four businesses existed, I’d probably use them. (Especially if the bank had an attractive, easy-to-use website where I could do all my banking. OMG, and they could partner with Mint and store the financial information somewhere other than Mint’s servers.)

Rain

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Do you think my professors will accept, “It’s pouring out and my umbrella is at home” as an excused absence?

Have humans always been reluctant to go outside in the rain, or are we just reaching new levels of absurdity?

P.S. – I’m not actually going to skip all my classes because it’s raining out. I’d like to, but I won’t.

A Day in the Life of a Geek

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I got my hair cut today. And I found myself thinking the same thing I usually think: why on Earth do they have ten appointment books, one for each stylist? And why is there a separate one to track sales?

I think you could write a pretty simple software solution. They just need a few database tables, really: one for the clients, one for the stylists, and one for appointments, which can just be a time, client ID and stylist ID. Then it’s all just stuff like code to find an open appointment within certain constraints (“Hi, I wondered if I could book an appointment with Joyce, ideally on a Monday, Friday, or Saturday, and ideally after 1 p.m.”), and to make sure that scheduling conflicts didn’t come up.

Surprisingly, I’m having a hard time finding a simple package to do this. Most of what I’ve seen is either ridiculously crappy, or it only supports scheduling, but doesn’t integrate with a client database. There are some medical practice software suites out there, some of them even free, but they’re way too complex. I don’t think my hairdresser keeps my ‘haircut history’ (although that would be a novel idea!). I’m really not concerned with HIPAA: if someone finds out that I was calling the hairstylist and the reason for my visit was that my hair was kind of long, I don’t think anyone will think of me differently.

By computerizing it, you can also pull out information easily. For example, they could pull up a ‘report’ of everyone they need to call on a given day to confirm appointments, and keep track of whether they reached someone, etc. The code could also work on trying to see to it that people get a roughly equal number of clients for those who don’t request anyone in particular.

It’d also be easy to track sales of hair products. I bought a new thing of hair gel today, for example. One of the other stylists was selling it. It seems like they have one money bag. (Why not a cash drawer?!) They could just record that it was sold, and the system would take care of crediting the income to the appropriate stylist. At the end of the night, they could just pull up a report on how much money went to each stylist.

If you had an Internet connection, it’d be a great idea to put this all on the Web. Clients could then book appointments themselves, and get reminder e-mails, rather than having to call. You could even have a client-side application at the hairdresser’s office (do they call it an office?) that would sync up every few minutes (basic replication) every few minutes, so if they lost their connection, they wouldn’t be dead in the water. And then you can play with AJAX for some auto-complete magic. (For example, when I call to book and they ask my name, they might start to type my name in and have it come up as the only match before they’re even done typing.)

The problem is that I have a very strong urge to roll up my sleeves and start working on a nice package to do this. Except that it seems pretty ridiculous, given that I don’t work for a hairdresser? I suppose I could sell the code? But it sounds like an Access 101 project, really. I’d probably end up giving it away.

This, my friends, is what it’s like to be a geek.

NTP Pool?

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I’ve always had a strange obsession with the exact time. It really, really annoys me when clocks are off. Especially when you’re surrounded by clocks, some fast, some slow, so you end up with like a 20-minute window: the time is somewhere between 2:50 and 3:10.

Unsurprisingly, then, I love NTP. And I’ve always thought that the pool.ntp.org round-robin cluster was a neat idea.

And then I read something about how they’re always looking for people to add their servers to the pool. I have lots of spare bandwidth.

I think I might just have to get an NTP server up and running and see about joining. The resource load isn’t that much, apparently, and it’d be great to share the gift of correct time with the world.

(As an aside, there are no NTP Pool servers in Africa right now. It’s tempting to try to start one in a few weeks when I go…)

Blog Work

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I wanted to mention a few things I was thinking of / plan to do on the blogs, to invite comments / suggestions.

  • The /main interface…
    • Should be the main page. I’m hoping this will be easy to accomplish. (WP makes heavy use of mod_rewrite, something I haven’t used before.)
    • Should truncate posts at some reasonable length.
    • Should show the blog something was posted to, not the author of the blog.
      • This is more of a pedantic thing, but it’s correct.
      • I have this and /meta, a blog about the blog. Both show up as “n1zyy”
  • The timezone seems seriously screwed up?
  • Some of the templates need work
    • A few (nonzero, featured on Andrew’s site, in particular) have all sorts of random crap in them, such as ads / strangers’ Flickr galleries. These need to be removed.
  • home.php doesn’t exist, which results in errors beings spewed everywhere
    • I wonder if I can just touch it.
  • I really, really need some caching going on here
  • Should I import all the old posts?
    • Part of the problem is that there are lots of lingering links to exact pages. WP uses a new URL format, so even if I import everything, old links will be broken.
      • This would help spur people to remove ancient links?
    • I haven’t really had anyone ask. I don’t want to go importing someone else’s old content to my website if that person doesn’t want me to.
    • Many of the people haven’t yet indicated any interest in renewed activity here.
  • I want to play a bit with the concept of shared categories; e.g., we could have a “Computers” category at, say, /computers, where posts by any of us with the the category of “Computers” would show up.
    • This would be somewhat of a pain, as each of us has our own list of categories.
      • Coding around it is entirely possible, but would require multiple levels of queries… Which is fine if people are interested, which is what I’m wondering
    Oh, and one more–doing ordered lists in the “Visual” composer is really screwed up. I keep having to fix it in the Code view. But that’s one for the WP devs, not me.

    Organizational Strategy

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    After procrastinating all sorts of organizational projects by reading about organization instead, I think I’ve finally hit upon the secret to organizing.

    Get a big trashcan. Use it liberally.

    Seriously, though. I’ll pick through the stack of papers on my desk wondering how to organize them, and find receipts for a pack of gum from four months ago and credit card offers that I never intend to open. I go through my (digital) desktop and find drafts of things I worked on four months ago. I don’t even need the final version, much less an abandoned draft.  I won’t even comment on my Inbox.  Err, Inboxes.

    The key to organizing isn’t buying lots of little boxes and cabinets. It’s of buying one big box, and it’s not just any box. It’s a dumpster. But then you have to start using it more effectively: as soon as you decide you don’t need something, throw it out. When you check your e-mail and just get a bunch of junk, before you grumble and close the program, delete the unwanted messages. When you check the snail mail and it’s just credit card offers from predatory lenders, stick them in the shredder. (It’s fun!) And when you go to neaten out that drawer, if you don’t know why you have it, just throw it out!

    off to throw away some more stuff

    Money

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    First off, I went to the dentist’s today. After my cleaning, I was waiting for the real dentist to come in and make sure the hygienist had cleaned my teeth properly, and it was taking a while. She offered me a magazine, and I told her I’d pass. A couple more minutes went by, so I went up and looked through the magazine rack.

    It only occurred to me afterwards that it probably says something about me that I moved Sports Illustrated out of the way to reveal Worth magazine, and that I found the article inside about family businesses increasingly being taken over in the rush of private-equity M&As to be fascinating reading. I was disappointed when the dentist came in before I got to the other article I wanted to read, about how Native Americans are investing profits from casinos into a suddenly-very-diverse range of businesses. (It seems like there’s some racist assumption underlying that? I’d have been able to tell you if there was one in the article, if only Dr. Las [not her real name, but all she was identified to me as] hadn’t been so speedy with whatever it was that was keeping her from seeing me.)

    Later on (post-dentist), I was counting a bunch of money. We had a new ‘pack’ of 100 $1 bills, but I needed a couple, so I had to remove the band from them. If you’ve never seen a stack of new bills, it’s really something you should do. (Maybe drop by your bank and ask to withdraw $100 in new 1’s. It’ll be worth it.) First of all, they don’t feel normal. We’ve all gotten a nice crisp $20 from the bank, but pulling money out of a bank-packed stack [not meant to rhyme] is entirely unlike that. It’s even nicer. You hold it in your hand, it the feel is just… strange. It’s almost powdery, and pretty rough. As you try to take one bill out of the pile, you’ll realize that it’s very hard to take just one. Unlike potato chips, it’s not because they’re so good, but because they’re practically cohesive. (When counting new 1’s, I basically ‘grind’ it between my fingers because, more often than not, I’ve picked up two or more without meaning to.)

    So at the end of the night, I had to count some unknown quantity of 1’s. I had 11 ‘old’ $1 bills that I had taken in, and some unknown quantity of new bills. I bemoaned the fact that I was about to have to count what was probably $75+ of them, which would be incredibly tedious. But then I remembered the other neat quality of brand-new bills: they’re sequentially numbered.

    So I looked at the last three digits on the top bill, subtracted it from the last three digits of the top bill, added one*, and knew how many there were.

    I wonder if I can start requesting that the bank give me only new, sequentially-numbered bills. But bank tellers, like chefs, are probably people you don’t want on your bad side. Especially the passive-aggressive ones.

    • Because 700-699 = 1, but you have two: 699 and 700.

    Tests

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    So I’ve got this enormous set of questionnaires on management styles, and it’s one of those things, “Rank from highest to lowest the following.” And I’m left wondering a few things:

    • Do many people try to ‘psychoanalyze’ the test? I almost always know what each question is trying to judge. (And if I don’t, I skip it and go over the others, look at the end, and figure out what it’s asking.)
    • Do many people get hung up on technicalities? On a question that was judging me on six different ‘qualities,’ including practical, economic, religious, and artistic, I ranked Mother Teresa highly as one of the most interesting people to meet. This raised my score in the “spiritual” category. I just think it’d be neat to meet her, religious or not.
    • Does anyone else almost always have their answers, on large numerical scales, gravitate towards the middle?
      • Does anyone ever think that, on a scale of 1-4, they’re really a 2.5? A 2 is too extreme one way, and a 3 is too extreme the other way.
    • Are people really so oblivious that they don’t realize that all 20 questions on these types of things are getting at the same thing, just paraphrased?
      • What I find most interesting is that the test just goes for the total… It should really look at the anomalies. I scored very low on the ‘spiritual’ category, except for the Mother Teresa question. Someone who actually cared about the results might wonder about this and wonder about it. But nope, it just means that I’m three points more spiritual.
    • Who writes these things? The questions are always so vague. For example:
      • Faced with a problem to solve, rank, highest to lowest, the following ‘methods’ of solving the problem:
        • Accomplish goals
        • Develop thoughts
        • Weigh evidence
        • Follow instincts
      • Shouldn’t you do all of them? The, err, goal, is to accomplish the goal. In doing that, you must weigh the evidence and develop thoughts, and let your instincts weigh in too. How is this any different from asking:
        • You’re driving along and a car runs a stop sign and pulls out right in front of you. Which of the following do you do?
          • Hit the brakes.
          • Swerve away from them.
          • Beep your horn.
          • Try to avoid crashing.
          The question makes no sense! You’d probably do all four. And the last one is a summary of them all.
    • The questions make no sense!
      • What ranking do I assign to “Developing thoughts.” I’m always developing thoughts, whether I try to or not. Cogito ergo sum.
      • In solving a problem, how important is “performing deeds?” What is that even supposed to mean?
      • “Being aware”–again, cogito ergo sum.

    I want to write these things. I could have a field day.

    Rank, from highest to lowest, which skills you used while reading this blog post:

    • Reading
    • Converting written words into mental images and ideas
    • Digesting lunch
    • Being aware
    • Performing deeds
    • Breathing
    • Blinking
    • Developing thoughts
    • Reading this post

    Car Cleaning Advice

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    I have to admit, I’m obsessed with keeping a very, very clean car. I’ve probably been waxing my car twice a month lately. (Which is probably more than is worthwhile?)

    Anyway, I picked up some polish today, and, driving home from the store, couldn’t help but take notice of how the cars I passed looked. I found that most cars looked decent: not too many had really dirty, dull, or otherwise bad finishes. But not too many jumped out at me as looking amazing.

    Testing something I’d started to think, I spent some extra time cleaning my car to make sure the wheels got cleaned thoroughly. Not only do they pick up lots of crap from the road, but brake dust makes them even dirtier. So I cleaned the wheels of both cars, along with a bit of wax. (I’m actually far from the only one to suggest that waxing wheels makes sense.)