First off, the premise of the meeting was to discuss how Wainwright Bank as a whole and, perhaps, Mr. Glassman specically could engage with the progressive blogging community in the area. If you don't already know, Wainwright Bank is not what you'd ordinarily expect from a bank. In addition to the standard savings and checking accounts, loans and CDs that all banks have, they also maintain a number of community resources and have a real commitment to helping out non-profit organizations. A good explanation of what this means can be found on their mission page. Their CommunityRoom.net page is also an excellent resource through which they provide (as I understand it) free webhosting to non-profit organizations throughout the greater boston area. And one other fantastic service they offer (that I hadn't known about until it was mentioned in this meeting) was that each branch has a conference room that they make available to anyone in the community who either banks with Wainwright or is one of the non-profits in the Community Room. As a small business owner who banks at Wainwright myself, this is a fantastic resource I have at my disposal as I basically now have a space to hold meetings other than my living room, or whatever coffee shop happens to be convenient.
As for the meeting itself, it consisted of Mr. Glassman, the aforementioned bloggers, and several other Wainwright team members. The discussion focused largely on whether or not Wainwright should have a presence on the blogosphere and what sort of presence it should have. We talked about the potential advantages of a corporate blog vs. a personal blog by Mr. Glassman and/or other Wainwright employees. We talked about what sorts of things should or shouldn't be mentioned on any such blogs. And we talked about the potential disadvantages as well. One of the major disadvantages, which I don't think any of us bloggers had though of, is that banking is a heavily regulated industry. Much more so than probably any of the others where we're starting to see corporate blogs pop up. Banks are very thoroughly scrutinized every single year, and it was clear that there was some worry on the part of Wainwright as to whether or not this would be a problem when it comes to blogging. Not being in banking myself, I don't really know what sorts of things the regulators would be looking for or might have a problem with, but it seems like this was a fairly large concern.
But regardless of how it's done or the potential problems, the main thrust of any blogging activity would be to spread awareness of Wainwright and the things they do in a way that's not intrusive or disruptive like traditional advertising campaigns. Basically they want people to get to know them, which, in my opinion and from my experience, is a perfect application for a blog. We came up with a lot of different ideas about things they could do, but there are two of them that really stick out for me. First was the idea that people from the various departments of the bank could blog about prevalent issues in personal finance, politics, mortgages, and general money related issues. For example, with the whole bit issue of sub-prime mortgages right now, we (the bloggers) really thought it would be nice to have an authoritative voice from a bank such as Wainwright talk about what sub-prime mortgages actually are, what the problems have been, and basically just shed light on the whole issue to those of us who don't know so much about these things. And I'm sure there is no shortage of other such issues that they could talk about. Doing this would create a fantastic resource for people around the country, and do a great job of spreading awareness of Wainwright. The other idea that I really like is a more personal blog, perhaps by Mr. Glassman himself (an excellent candidate as one of the co-Founders, and he did seem interested in doing it). The purpose of a blog like this would be to put a human face on the bank and let us get to know the philosophy behind it on a more personal level. In my own experience with my own business this has been very successful, and from meeting with Mr. Glassman myself, I think he would be an ideal candidate for it.
The decision is far from being made, of course. Banking is slow-moving and cautious industry. But I find it very encouraging that they're even considering this at all. It sounds like there will be a few more face to face meetings about this in the future as well. I'm looking forward to them as I'd very much like to be further involved in Wainwright's entry into the blogosphere.
Way back in February, I wrote about my feelings on the candidates for the '08 presidential election. I picked my top choice of candidates from both major parties, basically I found the candidate from each party that I was least opposed to voting for. At that point, my choice was Obama for the Democrats and Giuliani for the Republicans. Since then, a few things have changed.
First off, I did a little more reading on all the candidates and discovered that I kind of like Ron Paul. I agree with him to some extent on most of the issues. The only issue where I'm really opposed to his stance is on parts of his border controls and immigration plan. I don't, for example, completely agree with him on the need to physically secure our borders. Yes, we need to secure our borders, but our historically pretty open borders with Canada and Mexico are a good thing for all three countries. Rather than cut off the Canadians and Mexicans, we should work with them. I guarantee that the Canadian and Mexican governments don't want terrorists to strike in the US either, as it would be bad for their economies as well as ours. They also don't want any attack to come through their country, as that would be bad for them in many ways. So why not work with them, so that we can maintain the openness we've thus far enjoyed while still improving security. I also don't agree that we should get rid of birthright citizenship. In as much as we are a free country and a country interested and involved with encouraging freedom for people around the world, it is important that we do what we can to extend the freedoms we enjoy to those that don't. One method we have of doing that is offering the people who lack those freedoms for themselves the opportunity of giving their children a better life. Yes, it provides a motivation for illegal immigration, but if you really think about it, the reason we have illegal immigration is because the US is a good place to live. The only way we're ever going to stop illegal immigration is through policies that turn the US into a bad place to live, and I, for one, would rather not do that. Despite that, however, I like Paul's other positions, and he moved up in the rankings to contest Giuliani's position as my favorite Republican candidate.
The other thing that changed, happened a little more recently, and most people have probably already heard about it. It is, of course, Rudy Giuliani's recent statements in New Hampshire. I had previously said of Giuliani that 'his strong support of the PATRIOT Act, and his buying in to the "with us or against us" mentality spread by the White House in regards to terrorism don’t sit well with me'. He's now basically gone and taken that to the next level with his statement basically that more Americans will die with a Democrat in office than with a Republican in office. Even if he were right that the Democrat approach would be less successful than the Republican one (which I don't think is the case, though I suspect the best approach would be somewhere in the middle), what he said was essentially a threat against the American people. As Keith Olbermann said, his statement was basically an act of terrorism: the use of fear to steer opinion and policy. That pretty much sealed his fate, as far as I'm concerned.
So, Giuliani's off my list of people I'd potentially vote for. He now joins Hillary Clinton and John McCain on the list of people I absolutely won't vote for. In his place as my Republican candidate of choice, for now, is Ron Paul. Barack Obama is still my pick of Democratic candidates for now.
So a project I'm currently working on involves using the PayPal API to handle credit card transactions (two projects actually, but the PayPal part will be more or less interchangeable between them). I've never actually used PayPal's Merchant Services (or any other e-commerce platform, for that matter) before, so I'm having to teach myself how to use it as I go.
Fortunately, PayPal offers a developer 'sandbox' where you can set up what is essentially a dummy account to test your website without actually incurring any charges or having to move money around. This is a brilliant idea, and I'm glad they thought of it. However, it's really just not implemented very well. Setting up the dummy account within the sandbox is ridiculously hard to do and not at all intuitive. For the most part, it's like setting up a regular PayPal account, with a few minor differences. The problem is they don't document those differences at all making it very hard to figure out what you're doing. There's a help link on the developer page, but it doesn't actually work and only takes you back to the main developer page. So in order to figure out what you're doing you have to go to their developers forum and search for the answer there. When you do that you discover that hundreds of other people have had the exact same problem and have also resorted to using the forum. Reading through the threads they created you see the same thing over and over. The developer is confused and asks how to do something, and a person from PayPal responds with a very brief answer that barely suffices to help you move on to the next step.
As a specific example: when signing up for a PayPal account, one of the pieces of information you need to give them is your Social Security Number. For the sandbox account, it doesn't work if you leave it blank, it also doesn't work if you use a random string of 9 digits, and it also doesn't work if you use a real SSN. So I searched the forums to find an answer, and the only reply that PayPal had given when people asked about this was that you had to use a 9 digit number where the first three numbers were 1s (so, 111xxxxxx). They provided no detail beyond that. So I tried the number 111111111. Didn't work, because someone had already used it. PayPal, of course, never deigned to mention that you had to pick a unique 9 digit number that started with three 1s. So I tried 111999999. Also no good. Nor was 111222222, nor 111111112, nor pretty much any other pseudo-random string I could come up with. Eventually I had to settle with taking my real SSN and changing the first three digits to 111. This worked, but isn't a very good solution. Since the first three digits of your Social Security Number indicate what office your number was issued in, it's not that difficult to figure out the first three numbers of someone's based on where they were born (or at least to narrow it down to the point where a brute force approach becomes reasonable). So not only was setting up the account inconvenient, it was a bit iffy in terms of security as well. I understand that they didn't want to have to change their code a whole lot, but how hard would it have been to just set up the SSN field to auto-fill with a valid string of numbers, or to allow multiple people to use the same string? At the very least, they could have put a little note there explaining the constraints on the number you have to enter instead of barely pointing you in the right directly, if you ask, and then letting you figure the rest out yourself.
Fortunately, I eventually figured it out. But then ran into another obstacle, one which is still in the process of being resolved: you have to verify your dummy sandbox account before you can take advantage of the PayPal Merchant Services. If you don't have a PayPal account, verification involves them making two small deposits to a bank account that you control so that you can then tell them the amount of the deposits proving that it's your account. First of all, it's completely ridiculous to require this of a sandbox account where no real money will be dealt with. Secondly, they again take no steps to simplify this process. They don't even allow you to use a fake account, because you still have to go through the whole verification process. So you have to wait several days before the deposits go through and then show up on your bank statement (assuming you have online banking, otherwise you have to wait up to a month for your statement to be mailed to you). Several days, just to set up a test account that uses a fake SSN and will never see a single real dollar. Does that make sense at all? I sure don't think so.
PayPal obviously handles a lot of money. And they make a lot of money through that. I'm sure a pretty decent portion of that income comes from people who use PayPal's Merchant Services on their own webpage. So you'd think they'd want to make the process of setting up and testing those services as quick and painless as possible to encourage more people to use them. You'd think, anyway.
I was rather surprised today to get an email inviting me to a meeting with the co-President and co-Founder of Wainwright Bank, Robert Glassman. Apparently Wainwright, as a socially progressive bank, is reaching out to the local progressive blogging community and I was one of the small group of people they sent the initial invitation to. I'd like to think that this is indicative of my status as a high profile blogger, but I imagine it has more to do with the fact that I've written about Wainwright on several occasions.
I suppose, when you think about it, I may not actually be that bad of a choice. I may not have the most popular blog around, but it definitely has a readership, and that readership is continually growing. I've also got some first hand experience on the value of blogs as marketing tools, and I have more direct experience with internet marketing through my position at Triworks which, while not a marketing company per se, certainly requires me to think about internet marketing and the issues related to it.
At any rate, they also asked me to spread the love and forward the invitation on to other progressive bloggers in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area. I'll be sending it along to those bloggers whom I already know of course, but there are certainly others out there that have slipped my mind. So if you fit into that category, feel free to contact me and I'll forward the invitation to you (I'm not about to publish the cell phone number I was given to RSVP to...). It's just too bad that Bruce isn't around any more...
and I'm still continually finding things that make me like it here even more.
Moving to Boston from San Francisco, I was a little worried that I'd be giving up the amazing variety and quality of food that was available to me. I was particularly concerned about Mexican food. Fortunately, it didn't take long for Jessi to introduce me to Anna's Taqueria, a burrito joint that makes burritos almost identical to those at Gordo Taqueria, my favorite burrito place in San Francisco (and it's been said that the owners are related, certainly their menus are). I won't say that it was a condition of choosing this condo, but the fact that there's an Anna's right down the street from us certainly made this location a little more amenable to me. Then, after we moved here, we discovered Tacos Lupita, a Salvadorean restaurant that's also within easy walking distance of our condo and which serves absolutely amazing food (though not quite Mexican).
I've since put together a rather extensive list of good-sounding restaurants around us to try. One of the places on that list was The Half-Shell which is actually right down the street from us. I'm a huge fan of gyros, and they have a sign advertising their gyros right out front, so I'd been meaning to give them a try for a while. This afternoon I went to get a haircut (Charlie's Barber Shop is a really good barber shop that's also right down the street from us) and decided to stop in at Half-Shell and finally give their gyro a try. It was really good, but that's not the best part. The best part, is that they serve gyro pizza.
I first had gyro pizza while I was a student at Carleton College in Minnesota. I was immediately a fan. Sadly, I'd never, until now, found a place that serves it outside of Minnesota. One of the reasons I was looking for a place around here that has good gyro is so I could try and get them to make me a gyro pizza for me. But now, my search is over. If you've never had a gyro pizza before, I highly recommend you head over to Half-Shell and give it a shot. Now that I know there's one, there's probably other places around that serve it too, I'll have to try and put together a list, because I'm definitely going to be insisting that all my friends in the Boston area give it a try.
On Saturday, Jessi and I rented a Zipcar and drove out to ...some suburb the name of which escapes me. The reason we did this was to sit through a 90 minute presentation on cookware. Well, actually the presentation wasn't our real motivation for going there. The real motivation was what we were given for going to the presentation: an all-inclusive 3-day vacation to the Bahamas.
Apparently at some point Jessi got us entered into a contest. The winners got, if they attended this presentation, a choice of two vacation packages. One is a 3-day all-inclusive (that is, food, drinks, and activities at the resort) vacation (not counting airfare) at one of a number of Wyndham resorts in Mexico, the Bahamas, or ...somewhere else. The other was a 3-day stay at resorts in a variety of other places including the continental US (like Atlantic City and Niagara Falls) not including food and drinks and the like. Obviously we choose the all-inclusive deal. So at some time in the next year or so, we'll be spending three days lounging on the beach on Grand Bahama. I can't wait.
The cookware they were showing us was by Royal Prestige. They make two lines of surgical stainless cookware which actually seems pretty nice. The guy (salesman) giving the presentation explained all about how their cookware is 7 or 9 (depending on which line you buy) ply whereas the stuff you see in stores is 1.5 to 3. Also, the exterior is all surgical stainless steel which is sterile and non-porous which makes it very easy to clean and safe to cook in. This much of the presentation I was all for. Stainless cookware has a lot of advantages over other sorts, and I already liked it. The rest was a bit iffy in my book. Royal Prestige calls their lines of cookware 'Health Systems'. The long and short of it is that their cookware makes it very easy to cook a healthy meal with minimal effort and no added greases or oils.
The concept really is pretty cool, and you can read about it on their web page, but from what we could tell, their product is pretty much targeted at people who couldn't really be bothered to cook their own dinner. It's designed to make simple dishes easily and quickly, and, while it could obviously be used for any recipe, the benefits of their 'health system' can't really be reaped with normal recipes. It seemed like the idea was basically to get people who would otherwise just go to McDonalds to cook dinner instead. In as much as they're successful in that goal, I'm behind them all the way. But Jessi and I are both decently accomplished cooks, and cook pretty healthy meals 5-6 days a week as it is, so we ended up not going buying the 'health system'.
I did, however, find their approach to sales to be rather interesting. First, they basically lure in a small group of people with the promise of a free vacation (which they deliver on). Then they explain (ad nauseum) the benefits of their products over the leading competitors, really driving home the health point (which is a good one, I think). Then they offer you massive discounts on their products (basically you can completely furnish your kitchen with cookware and tableware for less than $2000) as well as giving anyone you refer to them within a certain time period 40% off. I assume their plan is to get you to buy no matter what (and 50% of the people there did, so it's obviously successful). They probably have very low margins or maybe even take a loss on what they sell to the small group at the presentation. But by giving people you refer a discount, they're encouraging you to tell your friends about the product. The product also has a pretty catchy (and, I'll admit, useful) gimmick, so even if you don't tell your friends, they'll notice when you're cooking using Royal Prestige cookware and probably ask about it. Essentially, it's old-school viral marketing: they're trying to build a buzz about their product and drive sales mostly through word of mouth. It's hardly a new idea, it's basically the same idea behind tupperware parties and similar things. But it's interesting to see how what's pretty much the hot new thing in marketing, really isn't. Sure it's been updated and changed to fit the new medium of the internet, but the basic idea has been around for decades or more. It's amazing the things you can learn from a cookware salesman...
I've mentioned a few times that I've lately been getting into digital photography. I'm pretty sure I've also mentioned that I was feeling a bit limited by the technical constraints of my camera. Well, no more.
Before I didn't actually have my own camera, and had been using Jessi's, a Kodak EasyShare C340. It's not a bad camera at all, and I've taken some good pictures with it. But it's more than a little limited in what it can do. In particular, it has no manual focus ability, and no manual aperture control. Certainly these things aren't necessary to take good pictures, but having them gives you so many more options and creative control over the pictures you take. This wasn't really a problem until recently, as my photography experience was basically zero, and I wouldn't really have known what to do with those features in the first place. But in the past nine months I've taken hundreds of photos and, I think, made a lot of progress as a photographer. For the past few months, I've really felt that I'd run up against the limits of the Kodak, and that there were pictures that I knew I could take, but that the little C340 just wasn't capable of taking them. It's an odd sort of feeling, really, when you realize that you're being held back by the limitations of the tools you're using.
In about three weeks, Jessi and I are going on a week-long hiking trip through Wales with my dad (who runs an independent travel consultancy in Berkeley). I've spent some time in the Welsh countryside before, and it's absolutely beautiful over there. When I was there before, I wasn't much of a photographer and I took a video camera rather than a still camera. It was quite possibly that trip (which happened in the spring of '04) that helped me to realize that photography might actually be a good form of expression for me (I guess you could say that I was running into the technical limitations of my video camera in the same way that I recently did with Jessi's little Kodak). At any rate, I know there will be some beautiful scenery there, and I know I'm going to want to photograph it, and I know that the EasyShot will hold me back if it's all that I have while I'm there.
So I got a new camera. The new one is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8. It has 7 megapixels, compared to the 5 the Kodak has (not a huge improvement, but still nice). Additionally, it has a built-in 12x optical zoom rather than 4x, manual focus, aperture priority (manual aperture control), shutter priority, optical image stabilization, it can save images in RAW files (uncompressed, and therefore higher quality image files) rather than just JPEG, and it has a great, high-quality LEICA lens. Sadly I've been too busy so far since getting it, that I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (the picture of the old camera above is actually the first that I've taken with it), but I can't wait to take it out for a spin this weekend (which, in a happy coincidence, is also going to be the first sunny and warm weekend in a while). Now that the weather's better and I've got a fantastic camera, I plan on spending a lot more time outside taking pictures, so expect to hear more about that. But for now, it's back to work for me.
Oh yeah, I also just wanted to say that I bought the camera through Abes of Maine, which is basically an online discount camera retailer. In my experience they almost always have some of the lowest prices around. But that's really neither here nor there. What I actually wanted to say was that I ordered the camera on Sunday, the 15th. I ordered it with the free shipping option which was supposed to take 7-10 days. The camera arrived on Tuesday, the 17th. Now that's service.
Also, in case you don't get the title to this post, it's a reference to a recent posting on Jessica Hagy's blog Indexed, which is probably my favorite non-textual blog (it's images of drawings she does on index cards, hence the name).
...and already I've got something to write about the MBTA.
This time it's about the buses. I know first hand that, to people who don't live in and around Boston, the (often very) negative feelings people have about the MBTA don't always seem justified. But I think I've got a pretty good example to help explain the way we feel.
Today I met with a (hopefully soon-to-be) new client at a cafe on Newbury St. I took the bus to get there (83 from Porter to Central, CT1 from Central to Newbury & Mass Ave.). The driver of the CT1, as he was driving down Mass Ave (a major artery, for those who don't live around here), was making out a check (to whom, I don't know). And when I say as he was driving, I mean literally as he was driving. He'd have one hand on the wheel while he was looking down at his lap writing on the check with the other (though, in the picture to the right we were stopped at the light where Main splits off from Mass Ave.). As we were crossing the Mass Ave bridge he actually took both hands off the wheel so that he could put the check in the envelope and lick and seal it. As anyone who's driven, walked, or biked across any bridge over the Charles knows, it gets very windy, certainly windy enough to push a car, let alone a bus, over into the next lane if the driver isn't paying attention. Fortunately we got lucky and neither forced anyone into oncoming traffic on the left, nor crushed any of the bikers on the right under the wheel of the bus. Then, as we got to the end of the bridge he (with both hands on the wheel, thankfully) started swerving from lane to lane as if he were actually going to maneuver the bus through the compact car sized holes in traffic. If anyone reading this has ever ridden a bus in China (if you haven't, like roller coasters, and aren't afraid to die, I highly recommend you try it some time), it was almost that bad.
In general I've actually had positive experiences with the MBTA bus system. It's probably because I don't commute to work and rarely ride them during rush hour, but I've almost always had friendly, sometimes even courteous, and competent drivers, and they're even usually on time. I really do have to draw some sort of line at multitasking while guiding a several ton bus full of people down a busy street. As the Fung Wah has aptly demonstrated, it's hard enough to drive a bus as it is. Though I got where I was going on time, today the MBTA was not putting it's best foot forward (if it has one).
It's been a while since I've written anything. Just been too busy to find the time for keeping the blog up to date. The plus side of that is I've been busy with work. As business goes, I think I'm finally starting to hit my stride. I'm starting to get more responses to my ads (which, I think, probably has to do with people googling me after reading the ads and finding this blog), I'm starting to get more (and better) responses when I reply to other people's ads, and the specific jobs I've been getting are all of the sort that are likely to lead to a longer lived professional relationship. I think the most frustrating thing about this whole venture of mine so far has been the frequency with which people simply do not respond when I contact them about a job they're advertising. I understand that they might be busy, or might have already found someone else to do it, but is a quick, two-line courtesy email too much to ask? I'll admit, I've probably managed to unintentionally snub a person or two (which reminds me, I have a phone call to return when I get back to Boston), but having had to deal with it disturbingly often myself I really do try and make sure that everyone gets at least some response. But at least it seems to be happening less and less often now. I have to wonder if that is related to my recent upturn in business lately. Perhaps I'm actually starting to build a reputation and am looking more credible to potential clients. One can only hope. Well, one could also retain a PR firm/person, but I don't quite have the budget for that yet. It's a good thing I happen to live with Boston's foremost expert in internet and word-of-mouth marketing.
For now, and until Monday, however, Jessi and I are in Santa Fe visiting my mom. I like it here. My mom's house is maybe 25 minutes outside of the actual city, off a dirt road in the middle of the desert. It's about a 12 acre property, surrounded by a small community of similar properties. Most people around here, including my mom, have horses which means they also tend to keep things pretty quiet and relaxed. It's a great place to go and just do nothing for a while, which can make for a very nice break from being in Boston and running a business (or two). The weather's also been fantastic. Today it was 75° and sunny. Compared to the rain and even snow Boston's been getting today. I even managed to remember to bring my camera, so hopefully I'll be able to spend some time just wandering around the desert taking pictures. I've already found a few good shots I want to go back to with the camera later. (And a few that could be great, but not until I get a better camera. The one I'm using doesn't even have manual focus, let alone aperture priority or anything fun like that.)
Well, guess it's back to some more relaxing before dinner.
