Tag: technology

e-delivery of invoices

While I’m ranting about business practices stuck in the 20th century, there is a simple reason I frequently decline online delivery of statements. What assurance do I have that after I terminate my account, I will still have access to my account records?

If you want me to sign up for e-delivery, give me some assurance that my records will remain online and accessible for a reasonable period of time. Regardless of the status of my account with you. In other words, match the functionality of paper statements.

If I cancel my account with you, my paper records don’t self-destruct. If you want me sign up for e-delivery, implement and publish your document retention policy that is client friendly and aligns with IRS guidelines. If I have an account with you and cancel it, my account history must remain accessible to me for at least 3 years. 

Considering the cost of printing and mailing statements versus the incredibly cheap cost of storing electronic records, this seems like a no-brainer.

Here are a few more suggestions for a good implementation:

 • Provide a simple method for downloading multiple statements. Quite often I don’t care at all about my statements until the end of the year when I want to download all of them. Selecting a period, clicking download, renaming the statement, and repeating a dozen times is tedious.
 • Give the downloaded files a name useful to humans. Filenames like 82383423546602382_08-08.pdf are not  human friendly.
 • Prefix filenames with a date nomenclature like: YYYY_MM or YYYY_q1. That way, when I’m looking at a folder with several years worth of statements, they are sorted properly.
 • If I cancelled my account with you N years ago and you’re about to expunge my records, make a good faith attempt to inform me prior to that event.

too mobile?

iPhone 3G white 16GB
iPhone 3G black 16GB
iPhone 4GB
iPod 40GB white
AT&T Tilt 8925
Palm Treo 755P
Palm Treo 700P
Samsung A900
Nokia 1100b

    My policy of getting rid of old electronic goodies before buying more has been laxly enforced. It’s time for another round of Craigslist/eBay postings. All but the iPhones will soon be sold. Jay Simon, does that answer any of your questions about how we like the iPhone?

    iPhone resurrection

    On Saturday, I attended a housewarming party at a friends. He’s got a great house in Lake Washington and his party coincided with the Blue Angels air show. During the afternoon, a few of us helped him take a dip in the lake. The humor would not have been lost so suddenly if he hadn’t come up minus his iPhone, which went into the lake with him.

    Between the cadre of tech geeks present, we had spare iPhones but this wretched soul had not synced his iPhone since January. I dove in and concluded that the bottom was about 20 feet deep and my lungs are only conditioned to free dives of 15 feet. So we formulated a plan. Jen and I drove home and fetched our SCUBA gear. Nelson fetched his tanks and BCD. We found a couple bricks to use as weights and went in. Nelson took a turn diving and then I did. After 10 minutes of swimming around face down and fins up, I found the phone.

    There was much rejoicing but after 3 hours underwater, there was little hope of the phone working again. To prevent any further water damage I disassembled the iPhone and removed the battery. What surprised me was that I could find no evidence of the magic smoke having leaked out. That meant that either a component I couldn’t see had fried, Apple had some type of circuitry to prevent shorts, or we were just plain lucky.

    Having the battery removed, the phone could now be safely “washed.” As we may remember from high school chemistry, pure water does not conduct electricity. It is the impurities in the water that allow water to conduct and wreak havoc on electronics. To stand any chance of recovery, the dirty water must be removed. Better still if I can also get as much of the lake sediment removed as well. Instead of distilled water, I prepared a bath of isopropyl alcohol and immersed the iPhone for a couple hours.

    Why alcohol? Because even if I placed the phone in a ziplock full or rice, or my warming oven, it would take 3-6 days for the phone to completely dehydrate. Alcohol evaporates much, much faster. Isopropyl alcohol also acts as a water scavenger which further expedited the drying process. Finally, it is a mild solvent, which will help clean up any sediment that found its way in into the phone.

    After a 2 hour bath in alcohol I removed the iPhone and set it out to dry. Exactly two days later I plugged it into my USB charging cable. The Apple logo came up but it failed to boot all the way. Suspecting that it couldn’t draw enough power via the 5v USB adapter, I plugged it into my iPod FireWire charging cable and it booted right up. Voila!  A working iPhone. 

    The grand finale was soldering the battery contacts back onto the phone. After doing so, the battery still had plenty of charge left and the phone booted up off the battery. Our victim was able to sync his iPhone with his computer. Everything on the iPhone works (touch screen, applications, wifi, etc) except the phone radio. I dropped the SIM from my iPhone into it but got only a generic “call failed” error.

    Interesting things learned: The iPhone has an immersion sensor at the bottom of the headphone plug. White is good, pink means it has been immersed. A USB cable does not supply sufficient current to power the iPhone when it doesn’t have a battery. A FireWire cable does. WiFi will not work on an iPhone without the battery. Alcohol worked well as a cleaner, solvent, and drier.

    iPhone 3G is in demand

    I’m standing in line with 200 others to get my new iPhone 3G. My plan for just waltzing in and buying one a week after release with no wait was optimistic. I estimate that this store had 200 phones in stock today. I have been regularly checking inventory since the release and I know they have sold out of inventory every single day since release.

    install public ssh keys on remote servers

    I have SSH access to many hundreds of servers and am regularly needing to log into new systems. My SSH key is available via ssh-agent thanks to the ssh-agent script I wrote. To make good use of ssh-agent, my SSH public key needs to be installed on the remote servers. I have had to do this often so today I polished up a shell script that automates the installation of your ssh key on remote servers. It is now fit for mass consumption.

    kill-a-watt

    Kill-A-WattI’ve finally bought a Kill-A-Watt. Of course, I’ve been running around plugging stuff into it to see how much juice various items use.

    • 252 W: Halogen Lamp
    • 150 W: iMac 24″ under load
    •  95 W : iMac 24″ at idle
    •  80 W : Home build file server**
    •  50 W : 20″ Apple LCD display (2W sleep)
    •  48 W : 20″ Viewsonic LCD display (1W sleep)
    •  45 W : iMac 24″ at idle, display in “sleep” mode
    •  30 W : Two disk Firewire 800 enclosure
    •  25 W : Lamp with 25W Compact Florescent bulb
    •  24 W : MacBook Pro 15″
    •  05 W : Netgear GS108 8-port Gigabit Switch
    ** I’m very proud of how little power my file server consumes. I went out of my way to reduce power (and heat dissipation) everywhere I could. Housed in an Antec P180b case is a Core 2 Duo T5500 CPU, Corsair 85% efficient modular power supply, 4GB of RAM, Compact Flash boot disk, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of mirrored 500GB disks, and a 300GB disk. I clocked down the CPU, reduced fan speeds, run powerd to reduce the CPU speed even more, and used smartd to spin down disks that aren’t in use. 
    And that halogen lamp?  It’s gone.

    Taming my savage Savage

    I grew up surrounded by a million acres of the Huron-Manistee National Forest. Every fall, thousands of hunters would come “up North” to hunt deer in the outdoor paradise that was my back yard. Hunting was a way of life in the world I knew. If opening day of rifle deer season fell on a weekday, schools cancelled classes and businesses closed their doors. At 12, us lads were eligible for Hunters Safety and were out hunting. Continue reading “Taming my savage Savage”

    iPhone Wish #3

    Dear Steve Jobs,

    I am certain you have seen the YouTube videos and countless photos of children and toddlers demonstrating the ingenious simplicity of your iPhone. My two year old daughter loves getting a hold of my iPhone. She unlocks it, launches the Photo app, clicks and few times, and proudly shows us her favorite picture, “Big Daddy!”

    My 1 year old isn’t quite so proficient, but also enjoys the iPhone in his own way. It turns out the iPhone is a fantastic toy for entertaining young children. I’m not normally interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a child toy but I have an idea that would certainly increase the sale of iPhones and the iPod Touch: toy mode.

    Yes, that’s right. I’m asking for a way to turn my $400 phone into a child toy. The gist of ‘toy mode’ is to allow either of my babies to push buttons, navigate around, see my photos, read my email, and otherwise play. The catch is that in toy mode, they can’t change anything. No deleting Daddy’s email. No changing the minimum font size. No placing phone calls to my colleagues.

    Imagine of how many iPhones you will sell when babies are teething on them and toddlers are dropping ’em in toilets because parents feel ‘safe’ letting them play with it unsupervised. The prospects of, or horror, actually having to use our old Palm or Windows Mobile phones will spur us back to the Apple Store.