I read an article written by John C. Dvorak posted on MarketWatch about Foxconn; I thought it was quite interesting and worth a read.
From what friends have told me and from most reports it is “essentially a steel mill on one end and computers come out of the other end.”
Read More: Foxconn’s troubles expose China’s woes
Last Saturday I was trying to print a simple postage label for a package I wanted to ship. All I wanted was a shipping label. I thought it would take me five minutes at USPS.com, but it turns out a pot-roast cooks in less time that it takes to print a shipping label! After using their sites, I have come to the conclusion that the United States Postal Service (USPS) and United Parcel Service (UPS) go through very little, if any, user acceptance testing. FedEx isn’t much better; I did get a label in 10 minutes, but their rates are significantly higher than I was willing to pay. Here are the pains I felt while navigating though the websites of the three major United States shippers.
While navigating my way around the Internet, I come across glaring errors all the time; calculation errors, typos, horrible formatting, etcetera. Errors are more common that I could imagine. These errors dilute my trust in a company’s brand and make me think twice before doing business with them. It is so incredibly vital to review everything before publishing content to the Internet; you never know who could be looking at it. Below are two examples.
The Grocery Game is a service that informs their customers on how to combine coupons and promotions, at a variety of grocery stores, in order to get the best deal possible. They distribute updates on a weekly basis to paying customers. Here is a screen shot from an E-mail they recently sent me encouraging me to sign up.
Since when does $2 divided by 3 equal $0.55? I would think their E-mail marketing would go through a more vigorous editorial review then their product. If their marketing is inaccurate, how accurate is their service I would pay for? Or if this is a screen shot of the actual service, I now know that I would be paying for something that was not correct. After seeing this, I could never trust the company.
I recently rearranged furniture in my condo. Doing so required me to use the wireless 802.11 G network on my iMac. I was not too thrilled with the solution; media transfers to my Tivo were extremely slow, and the connection was not as reliable as the hardwired one I had become accustomed to.
I remembered that my condo had many phone jacks throughout, so I thought I would research how my builder wired my unit, and maybe change the phone jacks to Ethernet jacks. Worse case scenario, I could at least get one 100 Mb connection from my iMac on one wall, to my Tivo under the TV on the other wall.
Turns out, the builder did a remarkably robust job with the wiring! He used Cat5 cabling and all connections went to the closet! What a blessing!
I replaced all the wall plates with new versions and terminate the cat5 cables with Ethernet keystones. I then created a small little networking area in my laundry closet. Luckily, the builder also wired the cable lines to the same location he put the phone wiring. I was able to tap into the cable line right where I terminated the Ethernet in the closet.
After some cable crimping and wall mounting I was set! My cable modem and router were hidden in my laundry closet, with hard wired Gigabit capable Ethernet jacks throughout my condo. Pretty slick! And all under $15.
Next Step: Gigabit 802.11 N router!
I follow local business news very closely and Crain’s Chicago Business is an incredible source for Chicago business news. They have excellent reporting, a broad range of stories, and even a well produced daily video podcast (iTunes). However, Crain’s E-mail alerts have some opportunity for improvement. And as many of my friends and colleague know, I am a “Formatting Nazi”.
Here is a quick “1-minute” formatting improvement.
The improved segment is easier to read; looking cleaner, better structured, and more professional. I made five improvements, each of which made a dramatic difference.
One of my clients caught a virus on her computer this last week. In an attempt to correct the problem, she installed Norton Antivirus 2010 before doing a full system scan using the boot disk. The first time she rebooted the computer, she got into a logon logoff loop; after entering her login information and submitting it, Windows XP would automatically logoff the account. It was at this point she contacted me and I came to help her solve the problem. [See the bottom of this post for the solution]
