Category: Uncategorized

SPAM is a Pain!

The last blog posting discussed methods to eliminate or reduce unwanted physical USPS mail.

This posting discusses the scourge of the Internet: SPAM.

 Everyone, it seems, gets SPAM. Most people also seem to have lots of trouble getting rid of SPAM. This posting outlines some techniques to try to eliminate or severely cut down your SPAM volume. Not everyone might be willing to try all the steps listed below, but it’s a good list to keep in mind nonetheless.

SPAM is Part Behavioral (the computer user’s fault)

With social media being the predominant reason to be “on the Internet” for many, freeing up personal information seems to quickly follow. Personal information, like email accounts. Thus, SPAM is part behavioral.

Companies everywhere seem to want your email address(es). Why? So they can try to sell you more stuff you probably don’t need or want, AND, so they can sell your information. In all fairness, many companies you already work with user your email address legitimately, that is, how you would want them to. But, avoiding SPAM means you probably don’t freely offer up your email account information when just anybody or any just Web site asks for it. There are other ways to thwart sites’ “necessity” of having your email address discussed below.

Have your own Domain

One way to avoid SPAM is to have your own domain name and email on that domain. By just having your own domain, you’re instantly out of the email guessing programs used by SPAMMERs that target domains like Yahoo, Comcast, and the like.

(Hurricane could help you set up your own domain and email accounts.)

Use Email Forwarders

An email forwarder, unlike a regular email account, sends email that comes to that forwarder’s email address to another email address you specify when setting up the forwarder. The good news is that the forwarder looks exactly like any email address.

Forwarders are an excellent choice for situations where a Web site requires that you leave an email address. Often Web sites will send you a confirmation link to the email address you specify. Because the forwarder shields the final email address that receives the email, this target email address remains hidden from SPAMMERs. Also, with forwarders, you see which forwarder’s address was used in the email’s “From” field.

Here’s a quick example:

We created a forwarder called: “myforwarder@mydomain.com”. When we set up the forwarder, we told the system to forward any email that came to this address to our actual email account. Now, when we open our actual email account, we will see any messages from the “myforwarder@mydomain.com” in the “from” part of the email, as well as email from our actual email accounts. Cool.

Therefore, a huge benefit of forwarders is that you know which forwarder account is sending you SPAM, if any. It’s also then easy to delete a forwarder since your actual email account was always hidden. SPAM problem gone (from that forwarder, anyway).

The downside of forwarders is that you have to set up each one. Although Hurricane would help you set up forwarders, there is still some time, effort, and thought that needs to go into and maintaining them.

Use Multiple Email Accounts

Sometimes, you’ll still want to respond to a message, perhaps one you received from a forwarder. So, you’ll still need real email accounts. If you got a legitimate email from one of your forwarders and want to respond to that forwarded email, you’d need an actual email account. However, in this case, you’d probably feel comfortable responding with a real email account: no spam risk.

It’s always good to have multiple email accounts you use for various needs and even comfort levels (well, maybe you aren’t “that sure” this forwarder you want to reply to is not a SPAMMER.).

Consider creating some email accounts knowing you won’t keep them that long. Perhaps you need a special email account for a job search or for traveling. If these temporary email accounts get SPAMMED, just delete them!

Pick Good Email Addresses

SPAMMERs will try to create emails to typical email addresses.

Examples of email addresses SPAMMERs target: administrator@…, accounting@…, info@…, and so on.

Thus, if you create email addresses that violate these auto spam generation rules, you’re another step ahead.

Don’t post Email Addresses on Websites

Posting an email address on your Web site, especially as a clickable link, is a sure way to get your email address harvested by SPAM bots. Some folks resort to a graphic image of their address or separating parts of the email addresses with quotes to try to fool the bots.

While these tactics might work, or help, it’s still best to just not post your email address at all. Period.

Use a Content Management System (CMS) with a contact form where the system exposes no email address at all. The user fills in a form and submits it. The emailing happens behind the scenes. Thus, no email addresses exposed. You may still get some spam, even with a con » tact form, but it will be MUCH less than if you post your email address on your web site.

(Hurricane can help you set up a CMS on our hosting servers.)

A Domain where you have your email (For example, AOL.COM) was hacked.

    Recently, AOL had an issue where their servers where hacked in some way and email addresses were compromised. People were getting the infamous single line emails with a clickable link to executable code.

This hacking problem reinforces the benefit from having your own domain with your own email on that domain. Since AOL has so many email address already (not to pick on AOL, as this hacking problem happens to others too), it might be difficult to get a set of email addresses you want to use. Additionally, many ISPs will limit just how many email addresses you can have. Do ISPs offer forwarders? Not usually, so you could be out of luck there too.

Should You Click Unsubscribe Links?

When you get a SPAM message, you’ll often see a “click to unsubscribe” link at the bottom. Should you click it? In General: NO WAY!  If it’s SPAM, since you didn’t “subscribe” in the first place, why confirm to the SPAMMER that you are a legitimate email address?

On the other hand, some companies you work with may occasionally send you marketing emails also with an unsubscribe link. You might feel more comfortable about clicking the unsubscribe link in this case. Of course this company also assumed you wanted to be “opted-in” on their junk email marketing (nope), which is annoying, but they’re probably going to respect your opt out (unsubscribe me) request.

Use a SPAM Filtering service?

Although we don’t recommend or list any of these services, you can find them by some quick searches. These services become an intermediary for your email, usually at some cost.

Conclusion

Email and SPAM are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Trying some simple techniques for SPAM elimination can go a long way to reduce, or even eliminate it. Part of SPAM is behavioral on the user’s part (freely giving away information, filling out warranty cards, etc.). Yet, another part of SPAM is insidious (ISP hacks, etc.).

Hurricane can help you set up your own domain with email forwarders and email accounts.

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

In the world where “opinions” travel through the Internet at light speed often presented as “facts”, how do you know what you can believe? If there is a single skill that is necessary for day to day living it’s being able to think critically. That is, being able to separate the silly from the factual, the rational from the irrational, and the biased from the unbiased. Of all the skills taught in schools, critical thinking never takes front stage. Thus, sooner rather than later, you’re on your own to think, or to try and think, critically.

Here Is a Common Example:

Say an advertisement says their product cleans better than “the leading competitor” by 500%. Of course, 500% sounds big, but 500% just means five times “something”. If the “something” is small to begin with, then five times that amount may not be significantly greater. So, when an advertisement says that a product cleans 500% better than the “leading competitor”, some of the questions that might come to mind include:

– Was there any serious investigation done at all or is this ad just a silly claim?

– Is that cleaning increase significant? What if the leading competitor’s cleaning metric is only 0.00034. Then five times that number is only 0.0017. Significant? Should I care?

– What does “better” mean in this context?

– Who is the leading competitor?

– 500% of “what” (objectively-obtained) cleaning metric?

– How did the investigators measure this claimed cleaning improvement?

– Can I trust the numbers from this source (the advertiser itself)?

– What kind of data were gathered? Nominal, ratio, etc?

– Were the cleaning tests done objectively or subjectively by (possibly paid by company) human “evaluators”?

– How many cleaning trials did the company do?

– What kind of lighting did the investigators use to view/measure cleaning differences?

– How did the company make comparisons to the “leading competitor”?

– Did the company use statistical methods? If so, which ones? At what significance level? With what assumptions? (where can I find those analyses data?)

– What types of clothes did the company use for comparisons (all white cotton clothing or clothing with colors more difficult to judge cleanliness differences between products)?

– What types of stains (dirt, oil, etc.) did the company use?

– Does the company have a “celebrity spokesperson”? Almost always, a celebrity endorser is a red flag. Logically speaking, a celebrity endorsor is: “The Fallacy of the Irrelevant Authority”. Of course, a celebrity endorser who is paid just to endorse the product doesn’t mean the product doesn’t work. In any case, since the celebrity endorsor rarely knows anything about the product he or she is endorsing, a celebrity endorsor demonstrates persuasion via personality – not logic.

With these critical questions, and others you might think of, you’ll be in a better position not to have, in this case, advertising, sway you with their (often unsubstantiated) messages.

From the critical questions above, we can generalize to say that good general critical thinking skills include:

• Curiosity – Wanting to learn more information about things around us.
• Skepticism – Not always believing, without investigation, and not blindly accepting what we hear.
• Objective Research Methods – Objective methods to test hypotheses. Verify data. Repeat results. Break a large problem into smaller ones if necessary.
• Humility– The ability to rationally admit we were wrong about a belief or idea.
• Thinking logically not emotionally

Example of Critical Thinking in Action:

When researchers start an experiment, they often have a belief on what the outcome will be. Yet, if the objective experiment’s results don’t match those pre-conceptions a researcher had, the researcher accepts the results.

Stop! You’re Not Making Sense to Begin With!

Be wary of claims where the claim itself makes no sense to begin with. If a claim says that something is 2 times smaller, or takes 4 times less time, you need to clarify that claim’s hypothesis. Since “1 times” = 100%, you can’t exceed that amount for something that’s less than 100% in some dimension (time, space, etc.). In other words, it’s impossible that something can be 2 times smaller or take 300% less time. (a measurement could be one-half as large, but not twice as small.) With imprecisely or incorrectly (or mathematically impossible) stated claims, you might correctly conclude that the claims themselves need serious investigation or clarification (and doubt).

Secondary Data

The additional problem we have is that all of the data we get is (at best) secondary data. That is, since we didn’t get the data ourselves, we have to believe (or somehow verify) that the data we got are accurate. Thus, we need to know who got the data, what their agendas might be, if any, and so on. Can we dismiss diet claims from diet company commercials? Well, show us the data! How was the data gathered? By whom? Etc. (Having a healthy diet and exercise and avoiding diets – in the first place – would be recommended, but never mentioned on these commercials.).

Conclusion:

Thinking critically is the a critical skill you need to have your entire life. You may never need to use Avogadro’s number or solve a differential equation, but critical thinking is something you can use every day to separate the silly from the factual, the rational from the irrational, and the biased from the unbiased.

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Have you ever been denied a purchase because your email address, that you use successfully for many other purchases, was deemed “invalid” by some 3rd party site handling purchases for a software company?

Enter the commonly-used regular expression, as found all over the Internet, to validate email addresses:

^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$

This regular expression allows any number of letters, numbers, dashes, or underscores before the “@”. But, that’s it.

So an email address like this:

mail—–i_____l_D@somedomain.com

is valid.

But what about special characters?

This is exactly the problem our reader encountered. The real problem (failure) encountered was not just a too simplistic regular expression, but the fact the email address didn’t need to be validated at all.

Imagine this workflow:

1. The user goes to a site to buy a neat software product upgrade.

2. He chooses to pay with PayPal.

3. He goes to the PayPal site, logs in, using his PayPal email with the special character(s) in his email address.

4. He is then redirected, after PayPal validates his credentials, back to the third-party payment site to complete the software purchase.

5.  But, the third party payment site, for whatever reason, chooses to validate his PayPal email address. Then, due to the simplistic regular expression they used, like the one above, they deny him the purchase with: “Email address is invalid.”

To add insult to injury beyond (1) faulty incorrect use-case analysis and the (2) wrong (too simplistic) regular repression, the email address is read only so the user has no way to complete the sale!

One of our favorite user interaction books: “The Inmates are running the asylum”, by Alan Cooper, describes these kinds of ridiculous user technology interactions.

The problem here, completely missed by the programmers at the payment site, was that the PayPal email address should not have been validated in the first place. If it’s good enough for PayPal, it’s already valid.

Apparently, no code reviews ever caught this problem either.

However, even with the incorrect use-case analysis by the third party payment vendor, they should have probably consulted even the most basic of resources for a more general regular expression to cover most, if not all, email addresses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address

This article discusses, among its many considerations, possible special characters in the ‘local part’ of the email address.

Thus, the following regular expression, though still unnecessary given the use-case and user workflow, would have worked and completed the sale (the user’s goal, after all):

^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.!#$%&’*+-/=?^]+)@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$

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Conclusion:

The difference between a programmer and a computer scientist, sometimes, is that the programmer will just “code”, where the computer scientist will just “think” (first).

In today’s world of “how fast can you create this functionality?”, thinking is sometimes a scarce commodity for anyone. Yet, for successful Web sites,  thinking about “user goals” is key. User goal analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s a fascinating topic.

Here, the user goal was to: COMPLETE THE SALE for me.

Sadly, the user goal failed (wasn’t correctly considered) for our reader who, even after notifying the software company involved after being denied the purchase (nothing happened to fix the problem!), decided to stick with his old version of the software.

And, the software vendor LOST A SALE for a completely unnecessary reason: for slopping coding when no coding was necessary and when no coding would have been better.

Enjoy!!!

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

You may have read this headline about the “very sophisticated hack” in a letter sent to you when a company or other data collector gets caught with lax security that they only then, after the (latest) hack, start to patch.

Thus, by all outward appearances, most companies seem to be reactionary: – IF a data breach occurs – THEN, a company take some kind of action. Then, the company often makes the data breach “sound” like there was absolutely nothing they could have done about it — had they *been* proactive in the first place, of course.

Getting your personal data takes at least two steps:

1. Breaching a company’s server and firewall safeguards — Most of the efforts to keep your data safe are usually here.

2. Accessing and then downloading data — Encryption needed to protect data if server breached.

You are probably now wondering if companies encrypt (scramble) your most personal data, like health data, on their servers.  We can’t know for sure, but it appears that in most cases, based on all the disclosures from the companies themselves, they don’t.

What we do know is that break-ins and theft of your personal data is happening at higher and higher rates. Companies are not accountable to us and seem to suffer no penalties for what we, as customers and citizens, must go through to deal with personal data being compromised.  

A rare exception is that Target has proposed a settlement from the 2013 hack for up to $10,000 for each customer for damages.  From the Target hack, hackers stole information from 40 Million credit cards. (This settlement is pending approval at this time.)

The evidence that our data was not secured (encrypted) on a company’s server comes when we’re warned, via a “it was a sophisticated hack” letter from the company to us that … “hackers have obtained personal information”.  If the hackers have obtained information, then it was not encrypted or the letter would indicate this fact and we could breathe a small sigh of relief.  Furthermore, this one letter is usually the last thing we hear from the company since the hackers are rarely, if ever, caught.  

It’s interesting that most of us use encryption every day without usually even thinking about it. We encrypt our hard drives, we encrypt our iPhones (standard in iOS 8 with password) or other devices, we encrypt our credit card purchases over the Internet, etc.

Although you might feel secure with the little lock icon on your browser, it is not enough to use HTTPS to secure your Internet traffic during transit if your data is then stored unencrypted on an insecure server. This HTTPS-only expectation is like taking a armored truck (in this example, the secure HTTPS “transit” piece) with cash to a (non-secured) table at a restaurant (in this example, the possibly insecure server where your data lives) and leaving the cash there (and hoping the cash would still be there the next day).

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While no company can promise total protection and security of online data, at Hurricane, our private clouds are encrypted using AES 256 bit encryption. To connect to your cloud data, you must additionally use HTTPS.  Thus, your cloud data is strongly encrypted on the server itself and in transit.

Furthermore, we use industry Enterprise Linux with advanced firewall filtering for your additional security and piece of mind.

Please contact us for more information on setting up a private cloud for you with your domain account already hosted by us.

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Smart Marketing, 101

Personalized or data-driven marketing to your customers, “smart marketing”, is something few, if any companies actually do. Most companies still just send the “blast-a-gram” to everybody with zero personalization or forethought. These types of marketing “messages” typically get thrown into the trash without the recipient (home owner, or other recipient) even glancing at the (wasted) mailing.

By following a few simple steps, you can improve your odds of getting a positive customer marketing response. And, at the same time, not waste time and money trying to sell your services to people who don’t want them or perhaps couldn’t even use them. There are no guarantees in marketing, of course, smart marketing or otherwise, but with some filtering, you can weed out the least likely to use your product or services.

Below is a simple example of how just using simple customer data and a database could save you lots of money — even on the first mailing. The amount of money saved on this first example could buy database software for several employees!

This example assumes you have a database (of some type), a label printer, and a way to print labels for a 5×7 mailer.

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Let’s say you’ve been in business for 10 or 20 years and you have 1,000 customers. Now, some of these customers may have only used your service once, moved away, don’t use the particular service your marketing flier covers, or are the best customers ever. But, how do you know?  You could go through each of the 1,000 customers one at a time by paper, but this exercise would take days if not weeks every time.  

We need a better way: a real computer database of our customers — which is usually very easy to set up.

Now, using “traditional” (non-smart) marketing, if you had just ordered 2,000 5×7 color mailers, which for our example, cost $2.00 apiece after postage, you would spend $2,000 to send a mailer to each of the 1,000 customers in your database.

Is this “smart” marketing? Nope. Just because you used a cool computer to print out the 1,000 labels on a cool new label printer could mean you’re wasting money faster using technology.  Instead, doing an even relatively shallow analysis on your customer data could narrow this list extensively (save your marketing dollars) and improve your odds of getting a response.

For this example, to narrow the list, let’s just assume we apply a “filter” to our database to our data so we only include “active customers” for the mailing who:

1. Have done business with us in the last three years.
2. Have done at least $500 business with us.
3. Actually use our product or service in the mailer.

Now, after applying this simple filter to our customer data, instead of all 1,000 customers, we now have 250 that meet the selection criteria, the “filter”, above.

So, using our simple filter, we’ve…

1. Saved $1,500 from the mailing cost (we already paid for the fliers, but we can still use the unsent ones later) and
2. We are sending fliers to “active customers” who have the product or service we’re promoting.

And, because this filter is part our our database, we can use it over and over. Note too that since part of the filter above is “date-based”, the rule/filter will potentially show you different customers on each filtered list over time. That’s cool since you don’t need to do additional work to show the current list each time you run the marketing report, label printing, or whatever.

Note that this example’s definition of what an “active customer” is a “business rule” and it’s never guaranteed to be correct.  Each business would need to define and test out their own business rules and modify as necessary. Hurricane could help you define business rules for your business.

The idea with a business rule is to define rules which describe aspects of your business that you can use in the database software for decisions. For example, what does it mean to be an active customer?  Or, another business rule might define “what is a problem vendor”?. Perhaps you track issues with delivery, quality control, or other metrics. This rule might be as easy as how many times you need to have issues with a vendor before you need to take corrective action.

In this example, we didn’t discuss if you had a customer’s email address and you used that instead of snail-mail in your marketing to save even more money. For example, your database software could “loop through” all the selected filtered customers. Then, if a customer record had an email address, and that customer was OK with marketing emails (you track that contact preference too), you email the marketing information to that customer instead of printing a label and snail-mailing an expensive flier. Or perhaps you do both: print a mailer and email. A nice flier in the mail, personalized in some way for a customer, might have a better impact than an email message. That’s another possible business rule — Always print a mailer and email if possible.

Finally, to further personalize your mailer, perhaps you use a larger label so you can include the name or brand of product the customer has.

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How do you get started with smart marketing? Some questions for thought below.

1. Do you use customer data?
2. How do you use it?  Database? Excel?
3. Can you search it?
4. Do you support your customers using that information when they call you?
5. Can you take your database software “with you” to the customer site?
6. How do you enter new information and keep your database up to date?
7. Do you personalize your customer marketing?
8. Do you track marketing responses?
9. Do you track each date a customer event occurred?
10. Do you know what types of products you offer each customer uses?
11. Do you collect email addresses for customers and also track which customers are OK with email marketing contacts?

Many companies can’t answer at least some of these basic questions.

At Hurricane, we can help you set up a customer database, import existing data, and get you started with smart marketing.  We can help you set up your own database in your office or in the cloud. We can also get your database system mobile and connected to your home office. You can start with a small system and grow that system as your needs grow.

Many companies will try to sell you you an expensive “CRM” system to market to your customers. However, for many small- to medium-sized businesses (< 250 employees), a CRM system could be much more than you need, is expansive, may require lots of other “supporting” software, and often, is difficult to learn and use.

We can start you on an inexpensive database platform and even teach you how to use it if you want to maintain it. If and when your needs grow beyond that initial database, we could transition your data to another database.

Let’s get started!

Please contact us today for more information!!!

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Have you ever gotten a dialog message similar to the one below when trying to use a program?

If so, what is the point of this dialog?

Basically, this dialog, the program, is telling you that:

(1) it has a serious internal bug or has found an actual file system problem that it is not handling at all
(2) it has given up
(3) it has dumped the problem in your lap
(4) it wants you to click “OK” — that it’s … “OK” (it’s NOT OK)

Unhelpful dialogs like these are often from lazy programming, poor technical reviews, or other problems. These programs, instead of focusing on “user goals”, only follow their internal structure – making that implementation painfully aware and exposed to you, the user.

What was the user’s goal in this case, anyway? Clearly, the user just wanted to check the activity log and the program should do everything it can to make that possible. Elegantly-designed programs do not give you these types of ridiculous error dialogs.

Instead, a well written program would instead possibly:

(1)  fix the problem in code automatically so you would never see the dialog in the first place, OR
(2)  fix the problem in code and possibly warn you that the program created, in this case, a new “activity log”, OR
(3)  if all attempts failed, some suggestions, in the dialog about what you might need to try, OR
(4)  other stuff….

Since creating a new file, as with the case above, is so utterly simple for an application program, why wouldn’t the program do it? Good question!

Trying to figure out the problem yourself could be tricky since other programs, all sharing the same log folder as in this case, might correctly re-create the log file if it’s not found leaving you with too many variables to know for sure what’s happening (again, not that you should be the one trying to figure out why the program isn’t working correctly).

In Java, for example, creating a new file, assuming paths are correct, etc., is as simple as this:

    // if the log file is not found, for some reason…
    File logFile = new File(“logs/error.log”);
    logFile.createNewFile();

Internally, (sadly) the program in question most likely caught the error but rather than the program dealing with it, it just dumped the problem in your lap. Programs with dialogs like the ones above may have not gotten much, if any, review by technical management. In many cases, management isn’t technical to begin with and is focusing on “shipping software on time”,  or other non software quality goals, which can make oversights like these more likely.

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Using a well-written program is a joy. Seeing the internal implementation bleed out of the program with unhelpful dialogs isn’t (a joy).

So, if you get a dialog like the above just remember that it was up to the program (the programmer) to do the work and make every attempt to fix any runtime issue found. Is that unhelpful dialog a sign it’s time to ditch the program and find a better one.

Good question.

Enjoy!

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

It’s fascinating watching the endless, and worsening daily traffic backups on the local news, which begs the question —why don’t more people telecommute – at least a day or two a week? Why isn’t there a national telecommuting initiative?

And, with the Coronovirus of 2020, a teleworking society is even more crucial.

Although telecommuting isn’t for every job, there are so many jobs where telecommuting can work (also called “teleworking”), telecommuting could make a huge difference not only in traffic congestion, but in other areas as well.

Below is a brief list with both the benefits and the challenges that exist.

Telecommuting Benefits:

• Reduced traffic – with coordinated effort, virtually eliminate severe traffic tie-ups
• Reduced need for a car in the first place
• Reduced gas and other car expenses
• Reduced environmental damage from car exhaust
• Higher productivity – instead of sitting in traffic for hours a day, employees can be doing productive work
• Smaller office spaces needed (money savings for company)
• Employees are more awake since they don’t have to up early to “beat the traffic” (and for some still being exhausted after getting home late from traffic the previous workday)
• Reduced daycare cost for kids
• Be at home for sick family, pets, other needs
• Reduced distractions (talking coworkers, unproductive meetings, and such)
• Empowerment – feeling valued by the company
• No need to endlessly build new or wider roads for ever-worsening traffic (hint: traffic is winning)
• Happier and healthier employees

Telecommuting Challenges

• Some don’t want to do it
  • There will be employees who want to work in an office. Management needs to therefore have a “plan” so folks who are able to telecommute share in telecommuting.
• Some can’t do it
  • Some employees aren’t able to focus or be productive without an office environment. Some exceptions must be made in these circumstances as these employees might be less productive telecommuting.
• Some jobs aren’t right for it
  • Service jobs require on-site, for example.
• Management by attendance mindset
  • Need for metrics
    • Managers need to measure productivity. Sometimes, managers use management by attendance. Simply stated, this attendance method means that …If you’re at work, you MUST be doing something. Seriously?

Not to create a false equivalency in the benefits and challenges section above, the argument for telecommuting, at least part time, far outstrips the arguments against.

Conclusion

The technology for a telecommuting workforce is here today (and has been for 20 years or more) so why are we still sitting in cars, in traffic, hours each day? By working offsite, for those jobs (many of them), which allow it, we could reduce our carbon footprint, be more productive, and happier. And, companies who embrace telecommuting could enjoy greater profitability with more productive (and better rested) employees.

There is more hope than in years past for teleworking. So, as workers have worked remotely during the Coronovirus pandemic, many, if not most, managers, have realized that remote work isn’t so bad after all.

Let’s get with it!

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Absolute vs. Relative Values (Don’t be fooled)
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It’s amazing just how misleading some claims being made are. OK, it’s advertising, but seriously?

When an ad claims that their product “improves ‘x’ by 50%”, does that mean it improves ‘x’ (or whatever ‘x’ is) by 50% relatively or absolutely, and what’s the difference?

Example 1 (using fictitious lightening data):

Say, the absolute risk of being struck by lightening is 0.00001% or 1 in 1,000,000 (made up number for illustration).

Then, let’s say the absolute risk of being struck by lightning while holding an umbrella under a tree in a thunderstorm is 0.00003%. So, in absolute risk terms, we’ve only increased our risk by 0.00002% or about 1 chance in 333,333. Not that much in absolute (real) terms, right?

What an advertisement might do to make their product more compelling would be to focus on the relative risk instead of the absolute risk (or benefit). That is, focus on the risk increase itself “relative to” the initial absolute risk of 0.000002.

Mathematically, that “relative” risk just a percent difference, or:

((Risk2-Risk1)/Risk1)*100

(0.0.00003 – 0.00001)/0.00001)*100 = 200%.

WOW. Looking at only the relative risk, it’s now a 200% (relative) increased risk!
(or 200% “benefit”, depending on how they’re pitching the number.)

To summarize, our new (fictitious) absolute risk of being struck by lightening by holding an umbrella under a tree during a thunderstorm is: 0.00003% or about 1 in 333,333.

Our relative risk is 200% higher to not having an umbrella and not standing under a tree in a thunderstorm. That (fictitious) risk was 1 in 1,000,000.

So the next time you hear that something is x% more or x% greater than something, ask yourself x% of “what”?  Since this % increase is often a relative and not absolute difference, that part is left out.

Below is a graph split into two sections (separated by the horizontal red line). The top portion has the relative risk pairs and the bottom portion (below the red line) is the absolute risk pairs. Note that the risk pairs below the red line are indistinguishable at even a tiny 2% scale.

The actual data for this graph are:
——————————————————————————
x-axis (vert)        y-axis (horizontal)
——————————————————————————
1                0.000001
2                0.000003
3                1
4                2

Caveat Emptor
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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Most software developers work under tight deadlines so finding software that makes their jobs easier or helps getting the job done more quickly is always a good thing, right?

Well, maybe not.

Consider the case when the company that makes your cool Rapid Application Development (RAD) software tool decides to do something “it” considers important, but you don’t see the benefit for you or for your organization at all.

For example, maybe the company decides it’s time to jump onto the “Forced Subscription Model” (as opposed to the “perpetual license”, which has long been the norm). Maybe the company never tells you anything about future direction leading to more uncertainty.

Then, after multiple software versions, you find that company won’t support the current product version the instant the new product version ships. And, to make matters worse, that product may not function properly when there’s a new version of the OS. And, of course, the company’s only suggestion at this point is to “upgrade”. Yeah, right.

And you have work to do, but now the software isn’t working!

Assuming only constant costs increases, when costs go up, the money for those costs needs to come from somewhere. Either you eat those costs or you pass them along to your customers.

Say you decide to stick with the current version, but that version all of a sudden has bugs with a new OS release. You don’t want to upgrade since could mean you have to sign up for a new subscription model. But, best case, if the fixes are only in the new product, you’d at least have to upgrade for “bug fixes”.  

How do companies get away with this behavior? (Hint: a basically good product in a niche market with little or no competition.) Look at ever-increasing cable company prices for another example.

In any case, you now decide it’s time to look for alternatives, but because you picked this unique (read: Proprietary) product, there really aren’t any readily available alternatives like one that could read your files natively and let you keep working.

You lack, for example, an alternative like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or any of the other MS-compatible office suites if you wanted to, say, ditch MS Office.  Or, say you use a Java IDE and the company starts to charge money for a subscription model. Now, in this software space, you have other alternatives, some free, so you can leave quickly if you want. Yes, you may lose some productivity, but you can keep working. It’s interesting to note that the Java IDEs that charge yearly fees don’t charge that much. Hmmm, maybe we’re on to something.

But without these alternatives available, you may be stuck for the time being.

It’s unlikely that anyone considers a vendor “lock-in” issue when they get that fancy software that lets them “be more productive” right away. And of course it’s always possible that you’ll still be able to stick with that company too, despite the lock-in, even if you can pass along the costs.

But what about future cost increases and uncertainty in general.

Thus, it’s a good idea to consider the cost of proprietary solutions up front as they’re not always the cost saver, due to productivity increases found, as hoped or even promised.

If the software you’re using was database software, as one example, a possible solution would be to come up with a migration plan to move to another vendor. That plan’s costs would need to be carefully considered up front and for the long term.

So, carefully consider that RAD software up front and possible migration alternatives to handle various (not only the ones mentioned here) scenarios!

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page

Not too long ago, a community college might charge up to $100 for all the classes you might want to take after the “full load” of classes. Today, a single 3 credit class can cost over $500!  Then, you have to buy books, parking, and possibly pay other fees previously not charged.

Various studies have shown that college tuition increases have outpaced other costs of living such as housing.

Without examining the causes of constant tuition increases, what are some of the effects these increases have?

1.  Huge debt loads for students
2.  Deciding if college is even worth it
3.  Only taking classes that are absolutely required
4.  Community colleges not offering some interesting classes (side effect of 3)
5.  Difficult without a community college financial commitment to find instructors who can teach specialized classes for working professionals
 
Thus, unlike in the past where you could count on a community college to offer a class that could be helpful to you as a working professional, nowadays the offerings are much more vanilla. Given the huge cost of a single class, professionals have better options that take less time:

1. A one-week class for a given software product or framework
    (Expensive, but focused, and fast. Exactly the content you need.)
2. Harvard, MIT, and others have plenty of FREE online courses
3. A yearly subscription to Lynda.com or similar
    (Huge course offerings.  No instructor support.  Some plans include sample files.)
4. You-Tube Videos
    (Free)
5. Tutorials
6. User groups

So, why spend $500+ for a single community college class, assuming there even was a course that could help you improve your professional skills, when there are plentiful cheaper options that are more focused, have less hassle, and have more user interaction?

Several reasons to opt for the community college approach include the slower and methodical pace, evaluated assignments, and instructor feedback. The college environment is compelling for many students — especially those changing fields. Yet, this option is moot if the classes simply don’t exist for the working professional

Thus, except for being a better deal relative to four-year colleges for “required” courses, community colleges are indeed pricing themselves out of the market for working professionals looking to improve their skills. This market exclusion is from either by not having the financial commitment to hire specialized instructors for those classes or by continually raising prices on the vanilla classes that might help career changers.

Some people are thus now rethinking the value of college, in general, for reasons stated here and for other reasons.

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Please read our disclaimer available from our home page