Over the years, I have long periods where I avoid Q&A forums. Lately, I’ve been spending a bit of time back in some forums. And once again, I’ve seen the sorts of behavior that make me think about leaving again.
Here’s a simple message: If you don’t like answering questions in Q&A forums, then don’t. Leave. You might think it’s all about you and your attempts to gain reputation in the forums. It’s not.
2019-10-29
Marketing folk have a few common truisms. One is that it costs way less to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. I have no doubt that’s true. It’s important to keep existing customers. And it costs a lot to get new ones.
For many people now, your website will be the first point of contact. By the time that someone visits your website though, a lot of things often have already had to go right. So it’s really important to keep them once they get there. Why waste all that?
2019-10-22
When I first saw Grammarly appear, I thought “what a great idea”.
I signed up for an account and started using it, and really liked what it did for my writing. It seemed to work well, although it got seriously messed up sometimes. It really didn’t like it when I had a bunch of code on the screen. Overall though, I liked it.
But then one of my security-focused friends asked me:
2019-10-15
Knocking Access was a popular sport over the last decade or more. Many data professionals saw Access as a real problem. Lots of silos of unmanaged data grew up across organizations and things could get out of hand pretty quickly. I saw all the expected problems that come from a lack of centralized management of data.
Some issues were quite nasty. I remember doing work for a company that did aircraft maintenance and had depots all over the country. Every depot had a copy of an Access database, but every single one had then modified it in different, and in many cases, conflicting ways. Then they decided to centralize the data, and oh what a pain.
2019-10-08
Recently, one of my MVP colleagues was tweeting about the problems he was having dealing with a country DNS name provider, and how much it cost. I’ve thought this for a long time, but it really does make me wonder if there’s much value left in country-level domain names, at least for companies.
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Awesome image by Lucas Benjamin[/caption]
Back in the 1990’s, I remember the “gold rush” that happened when people where trying to register domain names for their companies and how intense the competition became. If you didn’t get in early, you were fresh out of luck. We made a point of getting all our customers to register quickly. Even then, some missed out on their ideal names, particularly if they were just trying to register a set of initials or abbreviation.
2019-10-01
I deal with a lot of different service providers, and something that really sets the good ones apart, is their ability to avoid customer issues.
Can your staff avoid customer issues?
Awesome image by Holger Link
Years back, I used to deal with our largest national airline, QANTAS, a lot. They were actually pretty good at helping you out once you had a problem, if you had status with them. What they were extremely poor at, was avoiding issues in the first place.
2019-09-17
I attend a lot of online meetings nowadays, and I can’t tell you how often at meeting that starts at 10 AM actually ends up starting at 10:05 AM or 10:10 AM to cater for people who are running late. Right now I’m in yet another meeting that hasn’t started yet, as we’re just “giving it a few minutes for stragglers to join”.
Now it’s a different story if there is a specific person who really is needed in the meeting, and they’ve let you know they are running a few minutes late. But I see this as routine in pretty much every meeting I attend. Meetings almost never start at the correct time.
2019-09-10
I’ve been in the IT industry a long time. I see trends come and go. (Mostly they go). At this point, I think I’m an OK judge of what’s going to fly and what isn’t. (Far from perfect but OK).
One thing that always puzzles me though is the way the word Modern is used as a put-down for things that aren’t modern, as though it’s a synonym for the word Better.
2019-09-03
When I was doing some Snowflake training recently, one of the students in the class asked what utility they should use on Windows for splitting a large file into sections. They wanted to split files for better bulk loading performance, to be able to use all available threads.
On Linux systems, the split command works fine but the best that most people came up with on Windows was to use Powershell. That’s a fine answer for some people, but not for everyone.
2019-08-23
I might be a bit anal about this but I really dislike clutter all over my computer’s screen desktop. You’ll notice above that I keep it empty. If there’s something on my desktop, it’s something that I’m working on really briefly. If I need to do a presentation, I might have a single folder called Desktop that I’ll sweep anything on the actual desktop into.
There are two things that drive me crazy in terms of desktop clutter though:
2019-08-20
