asiel’s scratchpad

No matter how good or bad things get it is paramount to never forget about customer service. It is so easy to take good customers for granted and simply focus on the bottom line. In reality though, if you forget about customers and only focus on making money it will always come back to haunt you. Good customers are hard to win over and should be treated with respect accordingly. Don’t sell your business short by trying to make an extra buck in the short term. Don’t treat your good customers like a commodity. If you can see someone has been a good customer for a long time and has a simple problem to solve, solve it. Don’t waste their time or yours giving them the run around. These rules apply to you no matter what industry you work in.

Don’t let a bad economy be an excuse to treat others with less respect!

I’ve had several personal experiences lately that have reminded me of this fact. I hope companies and individuals alike are taking note. Those who treat others well regardless of the economy will prosper in the long run. I truly believe that being rude, providing poor service, and other similar behaviors never pay off in the long run. These tactics may work for a short period of time but not for the long haul. What’s more, isn’t it always easier to not deal with the extra drama that is caused by this type of behavior? I think so.

My favorite investing quote I read recently was from the famed Warren Buffett in the New York Times.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

Someday when I become a ninja I think I’m going to need an electionic weapon set. I have heard these are much better than the inferior electronic weapon sets.

I am a person who loves to ride bikes. Road bikes, Mountain bikes, pretty much any kind of bike is something I like to ride. I don’t ride nearly often enough though. Riding my bike to work is something I’ve thought about several times but never done it because I’ve had various lame excuses. Today I read an article about biking to work. I want to make this a goal of mine once I get rid of the lame excuses. Hopefully this day will come soon since it would be a great way to ride more often and get healthier.

A while ago my friend was drinking a milk he bought in a vending machine and was telling me something like “This mile sure is gross. I have to drink it though cause I paid $1.50 for it.” After a while I thought about what he said and told him to look at the date on the bottle. The date was over a month old! Then later we walked past the vending machine and I had to look and see if there were more out of date products. Sure enough all the milk products I could see were at least a month old.

So needless to say…always check the date on food you buy in a vending machine.

Sometimes I make things more difficult than I need to. I know this is the case with other people too. We just have come to expect things to be hard so we make them even harder than they need to be sometimes.

For example. Today I was trying to match a literal % character in an expression within vim. For some reason I thought it needed to be escaped with a \ or even multiple \\. When in reality it is just matched wthout any escaping. I was making it more difficult than it needed to be. This is a simple case, but it happens many times each week. I would imagine if most technical types kept track of how often they do this it would be more often than they expect.

I’m going to start making an effort to try to find a simple solution before looking for a more complex one.

According to this news.com article Microsoft will finally be releasing a plugin that allows for saving Word documents in ODF format. This is great news that many people have been waiting for a long time to hear. It will sure be nice to know that a file saved from Word in ODF format can be read by users who may not have Word.

In my usage Google maps has been pretty stable. With all the people that use it there are bound to be bugs that are found. I found a blog link to a very intersting “bug” in google maps. Check it out. I am amazed that this was able to get through the QA team at google. Or maybe it is a hidden “feature”.

I’ve been a fan of serveral Weird Al songs but I saw his new one today “White and Nerdy”. I think this has to be one of the funniest parody videos I’ve ever seen. The video is so descriptive of so many people I know and in many ways myself.

Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBGODdzzVw

I’m definately not the best math student in the world but these “solutions” really made me laugh and feel better about the math skills I do have.

See for yourself: http://immense-world.blogspot.com/2006/09/mathematics-genius.html