On a story tonight about large serving sizes of cheap food, NBC noted that the average dinner plate has gone from 9″ in diameter in the 1960s to 12″ today, “or 33% larger”. But, from a food point of view, it’s area that matters, and a 12″ plate is 77% larger in area than a 9″ plate (because area grows as the square of the radius).
Do the math, NBC!
My business uses Paycycle, owned by Intuit, for processing payroll. But Turbotax, made by Intuit, can’t import W-2 data from Intuit.
What’s up with that?
Then again, Turbotax data import this year isn’t impressive. It crashes downloading from one brokerage, and gets mangled names for securities on another one.
Like many of you, I’ve written code for web sites. How hard is it to remove spaces and hyphens in credit card numbers and phone numbers? Usually, it’s a one-line regexp. And some test cases. Don’t forget the test cases.
People make measurably fewer mistakes when they can punctuate long number strings. It’s easy enough for us to let them do it.
So write the code.
Dear Dell:
These days, we all want to cut costs. And save the environment. How about you do both at the same time?
Stop sending me paper mail. Postcards? Don’t need them. Catalogs? Likewise. If I need a Dell PC, I know where to go. (Frankly, I haven’t needed one in a while, since I mostly use Macs, but I have bought them on occasion.) Actually, the last ones were for someone else.
I have followed your website instructions about 5 times over the past year, and it’s not getting through. I called another company about a similar problem, and they stopped. Calling doesn’t seem to work with you, Dell.
Heck, if you insist, I’ll even put up with getting emails from you. At least the bits get recycled. (And I can filter the email. Oops, forget I said that.)
Sincerely,
Don’t Want Paper
Last week, SiCortex ceased operations and started an asset sale process. There are various accounts around the net; CNET has a decent brief summary. I’ve been with SiCortex since just after it was funded in October, 2004, and it’s been a lot of fun. We had a great team, a fascinating product, and some of the best customers anyone could hope to have. For the next short while, I’m still with the company to assist with the asset sale process.
After that, what’s next? I’m starting to look at several things, both new startups and established companies, and taking some time to do that. In the interim, I’ll be updating the site for my consulting company, Serissa Research, and possibly taking on some new business there.
What’s interesting? I’m not really sure yet. One of the consequences of focusing on a startup for a while is the fading of what else is happening. And one of the consequences of a forced change is a chance to look around again to see what really is interesting, from many points of view–technology, business, and value. Some of what I’m looking at will show up here, and some of it shows up in my column in the ACM’s NetWorker magazine.
So drop me a note if you’ve got something interesting.
(Yes, I know the link to SiCortex above will be dead sometime soon. But you can’t not link on the web!)
I’ve been playing with face recognition in iPhoto 09. It helps with tagging photos, but it wasn’t clear to me exactly how to get going with it. Curiously, there is no match for “face” in the Help, so that was not, um, helpful. Fortunately, Gizmodo is helpful, with “iPhoto ‘09: The Definitive Review and Tip Sheet”.
Now iPhoto should be done guessing photos of my oldest daughter, so I’ll get back to telling it when it’s right.
Update: the problem was that the help cache was out of date. Here’s how to clean it. Now the mystery isn’t why there’s no help, but why this problem lingers so long in MacOS.