Double Journey

I’ve created a twitter account.  It is more my speed anyway as I like to post short messages.   http://www.twitter.com/doublejourney

I recently read an article describing the cost of a wedding and the impact it can have on your finances for the rest of your life.   It made me extremely glad that I had my wedding the way I did because it ended up being a lot more fun, much more memorable, and , believe it or not, much cheaper.   Don’t believe me?  I’ve decided to lay bare exactly what I spent on the wedding just to demonstrate how one can save money by doing a destination wedding.   I didn’t spend anywhere close to the average of $20,000 that the typical wedding costs today.A little bit of background.  My wife and I went to Capri, Italy to get married.  We wanted to go to Europe for the honeymoon and we wanted to get married with a beautiful view of the ocean.  Capri provided both of those.  We sent out about thirty invitations and we ended up with thirteen guest (two guest dropped at the last minute).  We only sent invitations to people we really wanted to go but even if we sent out much more I do not think our attendance would have been much higher than it was.  We spent a total of fifteen days in Europe.  We paid for our own wedding and honeymoon, neither of us asked for help from our parents.Here is a list of typical wedding costs

• Cost of the venue
• Ceremony officiant
• Flowers
• Cake
• Reception
• Wedding Attire (dress, tuxedo rental, etc)
• Entertainment (DJ or band)
• Photographer

This does not include all the little things that people end up paying for in a wedding like various gifts and decorations so cost can end up being much more than would appear on this list.  So how much did I actually spend on the wedding?  My official number is $3885.  This includes

• Photographer - $1600
• Reception Dinner - $1700
• Flowers - $45
• Driver - $225
• Her Dress - $180
• Her Shoes - $70
• Wedding Invitations - $45
• Various snacks for guests - $20

I did not however include some other cost that might normally be associated with the cost of the wedding.  Most of these things are not specific to the wedding itself.  Things like my suit and shoes, (which I have used for other things) and our hotel room (which we would have spent anyway since we would have to pay for it anyway on our honeymoon).  However, I will list these items just in case people want a full comparison.

• Flight to Italy - $1500
• My suit and shoes - $700
• Hotel Room - $925

So that at the outside put the total cost of my wedding at $7010.  That’s it.  Things I did not spend any money on included

• Venue - Hotel let us use their balcony, and it’s amazing view, for free
• Officiant - It was hard to coordinate an officiant in Italy so one of our guests volunteered to do the ceremony
• Cake - Didn’t have one
• Entertainment - Didn’t have a huge reception so didn’t have to provide entertainment

Despite “doing without” on some of these things, I have to say it was one of the best weddings I ever went to (I am admittedly biased).  The food was amazing.  We went to the best restaurant on the island and it was better than any Wedding food I had ever had.  Heck, it was better than any food I have had period.  The venue was breathtaking, see the picture above.  I honestly could not have had a better time at my own wedding.  I often hear people talk about how they just never get enough time to talk to their guests.  That definitely did not happen to me as I felt I had ample time to talk to each and everyone of my guests.  I did not waste any money on things that just did not make the wedding more memorable or directly added value to myself or my guests.To sum up.  Had a great wedding.  Didn’t spend a lot for it.  Couldn’t ask for anything more.Don’t mortgage your future for one day.

I had a perfect example at work today why working with computers is more difficult than people realize.  It was further enforced by the fact that my friend Rick posted a link on facebook that hit the sums it up perfectly, computers do exactly what you tell them to do.

Think about that for a second.  Whether you realize it or not, human communication is very imprecise.  A lot of what is communicated between people is implicit.  Intent is not something that computers understand.  They only understand the exact instructions you feed them.

Several months ago one of my engineers was told to turn on a feature in the system to run a test.   We had turned it off because the feature was causing some problems but those issues were resolved so the powers that be wanted to turn it back on.  He did exactly what the request asked for, he turned on the feature.  The feature controls whether or not a certain data source is used or not.  There are times when some of our customers explicitly turned it off and under no circumstances should it be turned back on.

But since it was turned on for the purposes of this test, this overrides any configuration that our customers can do.  Nobody thought it would do this because this is not normally what happens when we run tests.  The system is usually set up to avoid these circumstances.  So what was the problem?

The problem was that the feature should not have been turned on.  It should have been set to not be off.  Believe it or not, in this case, the opposite of off is not on.  It is in fact not off (Null for those familiar with computer jargon).  The computer, and the engineer, did the right thing.  The “intent” however was not to just turn it on completely.  The intent was not to specify that it was off completely.  If there were other configurations which said to turn it off, as is the case for some of our customers, those rules should have taken precedence.  Of course they did not because the computer was told to turn it on.

So you see, the problem is not the computer.  It is that we live in a world where things are not always specified precisely.  And that is what makes software development so hard.

I just ran across a job description that had as one of its requirements

- Ability to handle multiple number one priorities simultaneously.

Really?  Did the person who wrote this job description not understand how this is quite literally impossible.  Now I understand what the intent of this requirement is.  There are often times that you have to try and correctly handle a situation where everything seems important and nothing can be dropped.

But one things is for certain, when push comes to shove there can only be one #1 priority.  It is something that most people just can’t deal with because they refuse to or don’t understand how to prioritize.  The more I work, the more I realize just how rare a skill it is to find someone who can correctly prioritize.

I fail to see how anyone, especially in upper management, can not know how to prioritize.  It comes so easy for me.  If you ask me to, I can almost always stack rank a list of things.  Want to know who my best employee is, no problem.  Want to know the most important thing about investing, its reaearch (followed by patience).  Perhaps the only thing that you might not be able to stack rank is which of your children are your favorite (although I bet a lot of people could actually do this)

I run into this problem constantly at work.  People don’t seem to understand that there are trade offs at work.  When faced with having to make one, these people seem to prefer not making one and letting the outcome be random rather than make a conscious choice to try and prioritize correctly.

Just this one requirement would make me not apply to a job.  It clearly shows me that at some point you would be faced with a lose-lose situation when something had to give and yet nobody would be willing to make the call.

It is Mid-February and I just got my ATM card from Schwab.  I almost canceled my account. I was so frustrated that I had not received my card in over a month but the last time I called they agreed to FedEx me another card.  It finally came, almost two months after I opened my account.  I can’t fault Schwab’s customer service, every time I called they were quite helpful.  It just didn’t end up in good execution.

CBS announced that it was rejecting an ad from mancrunch.com that was to be shown on Superbowl Sunday.

I have no opinion if CBS is actually being discriminatory here.  Their excuse is that they are unsure if the company, who I have never heard of before, could actually pay for the 30 second spot which runs for about $2.5 million. This sounds somewhat fishy to me because it seems the owner of mancrunch.com is willing to pay cash for the ad.  The wording on the rejection is

“CBS Standards and Practices has reviewed your proposed Super Bowl ad and concluded that the creative is not within the Network’s Broadcast Standards for Super Bowl Sunday,”

Now I’ve watched the ad.  It really is not that bad so long as you are comfortable with two men kissing which I suppose many people are not.  But seriously, I’ve seen WAY worse ads featuring heterosexual couples so I find CBS’ flimsy excuse pretty bad.  Why not just come out and say, “We don’t want to show two homosexual men kissing.”  At least they would be being upfront and honest about the whole situation.

But that’s not what I’m actually here to write about.  The one winner in this I can assure you is mancrunch.com.  Seriously, they are getting a ton of free publicity and it is all very positive.   I’ve been on several sites and there is a lot being written about CBS’ rejection.  At the end of it, mancruch.com will probably get more press for their rejection than they would if they had actually been able to run the ad.  And they won’t pay a dime!

I’m not saying that mancrunch.com did this on purpose but it probably could not worked out better for them.   That actually would be  pretty interesting tactic.  Just make a commercial so racy that it does get rejected.  People are just too curious and in this day and age they will go out of their way to find the commercial online.  I’m pretty sure it is something that Godaddy has been trying and I’m surprised  more companies don’t try this.

When I was at Microsoft, I worked on the billing system for my product.  This was mostly an integration effort with another Microsoft team that specialized in payments.   One of things that I worked on was trying to resolve a lot of the problems that our customers had with giving us money.  For a myriad of reasons, we did not make it very easy for people to hand money to us.  Many of these problems were not ours but that of our partners.  You would think that something as simple as handing someone money would be easy but it is not and our customers would constantly get tripped up just trying to do this one simple thing.

Well, this just bit me in the ass.  I have another website that I use for personal reasons.  Microsoft was handing free domain names and free hosting when I was looking to get it so I signed up with them.  My needs were relatively modest so I was perfectly happy to let them handle it.  Well it is time for renewal and the free offer is up so they want me to start paying for the service.  I have no real issue with this so I tried to log in to figure out how much it would cost me to renew.

Well, I spent at least 15 minutes clicking every possible link but absolutely nowhere can I find information on how much it is going to cost me to renew this domain.  How stupid is that?  All I want is the price.  This is the most basic thing in any sales transaction.  Tell me the friggin’ price. But this piece of information is NOWHERE to be found.  For all I know, they could charge me a million dollars to do this renewal.

The saddest part of this is that this is what almost all of Microsoft’s online applications use to get paid.  Anyone have any thoughts on why Microsoft can’t put a successful online strategy together?  If you can’t get billing right, what the hell?

This week, I got an iPhone 3Gs.  I actually got it through work, they replaced my Blackjack.  Although I have never felt compelled to get an Iphone, I was still interested in what all the hype was.   The people I know who have one swear by them.  My wife always jokes how I’m addicted to the internet and so the thought of having a device like the iPhone at my fingertips was appealing to me.  It probably was not as appealing to my wife.

A few days in and I have to say that I have mixed feelings.  It definitely is a great device.  It is easy to use and extremely useful.  the App Store is fantastic and you really can find an App that does pretty much whatever you want.   I’ve mostly used it to keep up to date on my e-mail and to do things like check the traffic or sports scores.  I could do the same thing with the Blackjack but it is easier to do with the iPhone as there are built in apps to go and get that data.

But I’m struggling with the iPhone on several fronts.  The  biggest problems I have come across

• The battery life is just poor.  If I don’t charge it overnight, the thing will be dead by the next morning
• The network is slow.  Probably more a problem with AT&T but it is still kind of annoying
• I hate that it doesn’t multi-task.
• Typing things in is a pain in the ass.  I am constantly typing things wrong.  This thing needs a real keyboard.
• I can’t tether it to my laptop without jumping through some hoops
• The e-mail client my work uses is actually better on the Blackjack.  On the iPhone it doesn’t automatically download new messages.

I think Apple hit their target market.  It is a great consumer device.  It is just a bad device for work.  I’m probably happier with this device than the Blackjack but only because it makes my personal life a little better.  Ironically, my wife, who probably won’t like me being glued to it while we are out, is now hooked on one of the iPhone games.  She is literally playing it right now and completely ignoring me.

On a similar note, is it just me or is the iPad kind of a disappointment?  Seriously, what problem is this trying to solve?

I decided to open up an account with Charles Schwab.  After getting married, my wife and I needed to setup a joint account.  We have split our finances for a while now, and marriage has not changed that, but we wanted the convenience of having one joint account.

Setting up the account has not been the best experience.  For whatever reason, Schwab seems to not have come into the 21st century.  It was possible to setup a brokerage account online but it was not possible to set up a checking account online.  This required that I physically print out an application.  I thought I would be able to walk it into a Schwab branch and open an account right away.  There was a branch just down the street so this is what I decided to do.  However, all that did for me was save me some postage.  I guess the branch couldn’t setup the bank account either, so they mailed my application to some central location.   They told me they would call me that day to tell me the brokerage account was opened.

No call came that day.  They cashed the check that I used to fund the account and yet still no call.  I called to check what had happened and was told that the account was opened and someone must have just forgotten to call.  OK, no problem.  The next step was to wait for the information on my bank account.  I waited and waited.  I waited two and a half weeks and heard nothing.  So I called again.  It turns out that the person who entered the information failed to enter the apartment number.  So my checks and my bank card seemed to be lost in the mail.  I was told to wait a few more days and it should show up.  The checks did eventually make their way to me, but no card.  I had no means to use an ATM and withdraw any money.

After a few more days, my wife called in.  The first person I spoke to did not seem to fix the missing apartment information.  Customer Support said they fixed the information and the cards would be coming.  A few days passed and my wife’s new card did indeed come.  My card did not.  So she called again.  It turns out that for whatever reason, my information was not updated until later and a new card was not sent out at the same time.

So here I am.  It is the end of January and it has been over one month since I started this process.  I still have no bank card from Schwab.  On the plus side, the customer support, in terms of wait time, has been pretty good.  Each time I call, I get connected to a human right away.  But I am disappointed by the fact that I have had to call so many times to find out how good the response time is.  I have not used their services too much as of yet, I’ve bought no stock through the brokerage account as of yet, because I don’t want to move money into the account until I have full access to it, so I can’t say too much about the other features of the account.

One last annoying thing.  Setting up money transfers is a real pain in the ass.  Once again, Schwab has not come into the 21st century.  The only way I’ve been able to fund the account is to “push” the money there.  That is, i go to my other online accounts and setup a transfer from them to Schwab.  Schwab makes it VERY difficult to “pull” money from other institutions.  It is impossible to do this online.

So given all my problems, I can’t strongly recommend Schwab.  I really like their customer service but that’s about it.  I don’t think any of this will cause me to close my account, but I’m somewhat disappointed that things just haven’t been smoother.

I’ve been quiet over the last several weeks.  I’ve been wanting to blog but with the holidays I have found it difficult to sit down and focus on what to write.  I really haven’t had anything meaningful to say either.

The holiday’s came and went.  It was a rather quiet holiday.  I did not have to do too much shopping and work was rather subdued since most of the staff was out.  I try to make some headway with my reviews but somehow found a way to not get very far on those.

That is my challenge for the upcoming week.  I have to get through my employees reviews.  I once again find myself doing way more reviews than I want.  I think it is important to do a good job with them, so I’ll get them done right, but I often just wish I could wave a wand and have them done.  The tool my work is using even has something similar to this but I feel it is a cheap way out so I refuse to use it.

I have been EXTREMELY quiet when it comes to my trading activity.  I really just don’t know where this rally came from and now have no desire to get in at these levels.  I’ve waited for the pull back that never came and it looks like i missed out on some really great gains.  Lesson learned but no need to compound my mistake by doing something foolish now.  I’m looking carefully where to invest.  I recently opened up a new brokerage account, separate than my other one, so that my wife and I could invest together.  I opened it up at Schwab, so now I have accounts at most of the major brokerage houses.  I’ll give a review of them shortly.

So I’m back.  Hopefully I won’t take a hiatus as long as this one again.