Coding and Beer

Ask anyone who purchases Amazon Prime and they will most likely say they love it.  It makes it quick and easy to purchase things on Amazon because you don’t go through the whole dance of comparing shipping costs of different sites. You know the price you see is what you are paying.

Now, imagine if FedEx and UPS decided to offer their own service instead. This new service could be subscription based just like Prime. You pay one yearly fee. For that, you get a FedEx or UPS account that you could use on ANY merchant website that uses their service.The process should go something like this:

1. Go to merchant website and pick out items.
2. Go through check out process.
3. When it gets to the shipping, you select FedEx or UPS Prime (or whatever branding they call it).
4. You then enter your credentials for your shipping account.
5. Done.

This would:

• Allow FedEx and UPS to get a subscription based fee (stabilizes their income streams a bit more).
• Allow customers to shop in more places besides Amazon.
• Allow sites to compete with Amazon on a more fair footing.
• Give the person more choice and less to worry about.

FedEx and UPS (or even the postal service) could all offer this. I know that Amazon eats it on some accounts, but probably wins with other accounts. Somehow they are making this work for them. If they can do it, so can the shippers. Even if they had tiered plans, I think it would work great. They could even be more strict than Prime by only picking up from vendors on certain days of the week (based on volume sold by vendor) or restricting delivery to certain days a week to customers. I can think of plenty more optimizations quickly.  They can still hold on to the old pay for what you ship model as well since not everyone would subscribe to this service.

Maybe I’m wrong about this.  Maybe there just isn’t a way to do this unless you eat some of the costs of shipping like Amazon does.  My thought is if nobody  in those companies are thinking about it yet, they should be.

I haven’t blogged much lately.  A lot of things have happened in my life in the last year that focused my efforts elsewhere.  I thought I would go ahead and jot down some notes.

Being a supervisor, I rarely get to code much anymore.  Lately I have been getting to do so on a project I wrote a while back.  I needed to add new functionality to it and it needed to have a design overhaul to accommodate the changes.  You know how you always have the “I would totally change that if I were to write it again” thoughts after finishing an application? Well, I get to make those changes to this app.  The new functionality isn’t a priority to finish fast, so I get to work on the app in-between other work.  This allows me to slow down on it and really update it correctly.  I’m removing a bunch of jQuery based javascript I wrote at the time and replacing the client UI interactions with a binding framework.  I chose KnockoutJS for that.  I also removed a bunch of CSS and leveraged BootStrap a lot for layout and base styles.  These two improvements required me to dig in and learn some new things, but the amount of CSS and javascript has significantly dropped on this project so far.  It has a responsive design now which will be great for mobile device use.  I love re-sizing the window and watching the elements flow correctly.  The rework will extend all the way to the database table structure, so I will be plowing through the ASP.NET MVC and SQL database layers as well by the time this project is over.

On a personal level, I started working out again.  It feels really good.  I have dropped about 15 pounds over the last year.  I hope to drop 15 more to get to my ideal weight.  It’s really hard because I love eating good food and drinking great beer.  We are still a cable/sat free household.  Netflix gets used more than I would like, but at least the price of that is small in comparison.

Spring is here, so it is time to start planning the garden and summer projects.  My wife asked me to build a pergola before July.  That should be easy, but I also have other large landscaping projects in mind as well and they also need to be finished before July.  Just got to figure out how to fund it.

A blog entry by Mike Crittenden titled “Coding skill vs. employee skill” got me thinking.  When I was heavy into development, I valued the Coding Skill person more because I was working with code all day.  As I transitioned into a supervisory role, I’m now looking for more Employee Skills from my people.  So I would say he was right on the mark in his post.  Just thought I would pass along the link for others to read.

There is an awesome feeling that comes from building a dynamic calendar in HTML.  The steps:

1. First you have to build a object structure (assuming you are using an OO language) to support the month, weeks, days, and content within each day.
2. Then you have to instantiate the structure based on the month rendered and query the database and load the content within it.
3. Of course, next comes the actual rendering of the calendar structure in HTML.  Use a table?  I started there, but then my friends laughed at me (not really, but I think they would if they had seen it).  I used the good old div tag.
4. Last, you need to style it with CSS.  To me, this was the hardest part.  Getting the correct float and borders applied to make it look halfway decent was an hour exercise – this is one of my weaker areas I’m trying to improve.

It felt good to finish it and see the results.  I know it is relatively trivial to some degree, but still rewarding to see the results.

Of course, I wasn’t finished.  I had to add some flashy AJAX popup when the contents of the calendar are clicked.

Overall, I believe adding the calendar view of the data will make the application easier to use for most people.  Seeing data in lists works well, but sometimes when that data is date based, there is no better display than a good old calendar.

Well, it has been a few months since we decided to get rid of our DirecTV subscription and I thought it would be good to provide an update.  The title might be slightly misleading, we still have our physical TV, we only use it for DVD’s, Netflix, and games now.  We no longer subscribe to a traditional TV service like cable or satellite.

What’s changed?

• It’s quieter around our house.  The TV isn’t always on making the house louder.
• I’ve been doing more productive things around the house.  Family, yard, hobbies are getting more of my time.
• I’m busy!  I don’t even know how I watched TV at this point.  I have been so busy doing stuff I just don’t know what I was doing before and how I fit TV into my life.
• I’ve read several books.
• I’m missing the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  I’m getting over this as it happens, but I do love hockey.  I can still go over to my brothers house to watch it if I want.  Maybe some of the last few games…

Overall, I recommend getting rid of the TV service.  You really don’t miss anything.  Actually, you experience a lot more because of it!

I have been fighting a bad design for a few days now.  It felt like I was continuing to make trade offs I wasn’t happy with.  What the hell, it’s Friday and I’m a bit squirrely … time to do some serious refactoring.  I completely changed the interface to my state machine and at the same time redesigned the database to make sure I couldn’t build my project for another day our two.

Visual Studio keeps lying to me saying I only have 50 errors.  We both know that I have hundreds more than that to get through…

Even with the big error list, it is the right thing to do at this point.  I will come out on the other end with a more flexible and maintainable design.  Getting excited again after feeling bogged down over the last few days.

At the dinner table today, the family decided it would be good to get rid of DirecTV.  The idea was brought up by our daughter which made it better.  We all agreed that it was a time waster, and we received more than enough media from online resources such as Netflix.  Going to check on our ‘contract’ tomorrow, and if we are outside of it, we will let it go.  If not, we will start the count down clock.  $80 dollars back in the pocket each month along with the extra time that comes with it.

I’m watching the Judiciary Committee talking about SOPA…I should just shoot myself.  It’s obvious that our representatives do not understand technology but are still making laws about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few people there that know more than others.  Some can even use the term DNS correctly.  The people who don’t have a clue show like a bright light in the middle of a cloudy night.

UPDATE:

Also, I don’t believe anyone changes their minds based on the dialog of the meeting.  It seems like everyone is trying to ask and answer questions to further justify their position they had before going into the meeting.

I know the ‘Cloud’ (or as I like to call it, the Internet) is all the rage these days.  Cloud services are a good idea, you don’t have to manage anything and you get to use some great services.  There is a cost though, even on those free accounts.  That cost is data ownership.

I read a post titled Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry  today.  I laugh at it because he should have been responsible and backed it up if he and his daughter ‘really’ cared about it.  Do you think these companies care about your data?  Not at all.  They only care about your data when it serves their interests.

I’m working on setting up my own cloud that I control.  Is it more work for me?  Yes, but I also gain the satisfaction of knowing that the companies won’t take my data away without any recourse.  Plus, if I manage my own data, they can’t sell it to advertisers and serve it up to governments without my knowledge.

Here is my public service announcement – If you don’t have possession of your data, you can’t have any expectations that it will be there tomorrow or that you have any privacy.

As a side note, I find it interesting that he posted that on Google +.  Do you think he would be mad if they lost all his posts?

I hope to add more posts in the future about my switch from corporation owned services over to self controlled services.

My name is Brian Russell and I currently work in the electric utility industry as an Information Systems Supervisor.  I spend my time managing the work of server operations, application installation and maintenance, help desk, and development work.  It’s a pretty cool job as I get to ‘play’ with a wide range of tech such as VMware, SharePoint, SQL Server, ESRI, .NET, Ruby, backup systems, networking, firewalls, log management, desktops, iSCSI storage, etc.

On the personal side of things, I like (trying) to learn the guitar, live music, hockey, trying new beers, poker, golf, snowboarding, and anything else that’s fun.