Ask the entrepreneurs advice
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@TimeBandit said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@jinpa said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
Paper or cardboard?
Papyrus
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@kazitor Not sure whether to upvote or downvote and kill it with fire.
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@Unperverted-Vixen
Upvote, then send in @Polygeekery
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@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
they forced Accounting to put that subscription under our budget
So that means IT controls it, right? So, since it's obviously a cost drain, IT can decide to stop subscribing, right? And if Sales insists on having a subscription, then they can put it under their own budget, right?
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@djls45 said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
they forced Accounting to put that subscription under our budget
So that means IT controls it, right? So, since it's obviously a cost drain, IT can decide to stop subscribing, right? And if Sales insists on having a subscription, then they can put it under their own budget, right?
Give me time. I'll eventually have the political capital to pull that off.
I don't have it right now, but i will soon. Oh yes, soon......
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@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I'll eventually have the political capital to pull that off.
You're gonna bite your way to the top?
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@TimeBandit said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I'll eventually have the political capital to pull that off.
You're gonna bite your way to the top?
probably, yes. since I'm not yet willing to lower myself to the level where i suck myself tot he top.
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@jinpa - usually Paper(Tape)...
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idea:
WreckIt
buy an old warehouse, scour second hand stores for flatware, furniture, etc that is in poor condition and just never going to move. scour local restaurants to buy their old china and glassware when they upgrade their collections. Get art colleges to give you their pottery and canvas art that they were going to throw away anyway.... you know stuff like that
Allow people to smash the ever living shit out of this stiff. For a hourly fee, plus cost per pound of stuff destroyed.
For bigger items of destruction hold auctions for the right to destroy it. Baby Grand Piano was deemed too far gone to be repairable by the local music shop? get a crane, hoist it up 90 feet on a quick release and auction off the right to pull the quick release.
modify a skeet thrower to throw plates intead of clay pidgeons. have people throw coffee mugs trying to hit the plates in mid air.
get an industrial shredder and let people throw old broken electronics into it, for a fee.
all sorts of crazy things like that.
Good idea or terrible idea?
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@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
idea:
WreckIt
buy an old warehouse, scour second hand stores for flatware, furniture, etc that is in poor condition and just never going to move. scour local restaurants to buy their old china and glassware when they upgrade their collections. Get art colleges to give you their pottery and canvas art that they were going to throw away anyway.... you know stuff like that
Allow people to smash the ever living shit out of this stiff. For a hourly fee, plus cost per pound of stuff destroyed.
For bigger items of destruction hold auctions for the right to destroy it. Baby Grand Piano was deemed too far gone to be repairable by the local music shop? get a crane, hoist it up 90 feet on a quick release and auction off the right to pull the quick release.
modify a skeet thrower to throw plates intead of clay pidgeons. have people throw coffee mugs trying to hit the plates in mid air.
get an industrial shredder and let people throw old broken electronics into it, for a fee.
all sorts of crazy things like that.
Good idea or terrible idea?
As a customer? Great idea.
As a business owner, probably a bad idea. Imagine the insurance costs. But then again it may work out that you could charge enough to cover that.
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@mikehurley said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
Imagine the insurance costs.
I would think with a good lawyer to draft up a limited liability waiver for damages one could mitigate that significantly. They'd still be high, just not fuckoff high....
"keep provided protective equipment on at all times while in the designated destructive areas, obey all safety rules, apply common sense and obey all range instructors orders, otherwise don't come crying to us with your injuries."
but you know..... more lawyery.
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@Vixen I've actually seen businesses like this.
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@Vixen said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
idea:
WreckIt
buy an old warehouse, scour second hand stores for flatware, furniture, etc that is in poor condition and just never going to move. scour local restaurants to buy their old china and glassware when they upgrade their collections. Get art colleges to give you their pottery and canvas art that they were going to throw away anyway.... you know stuff like that
Allow people to smash the ever living shit out of this stiff. For a hourly fee, plus cost per pound of stuff destroyed.
For bigger items of destruction hold auctions for the right to destroy it. Baby Grand Piano was deemed too far gone to be repairable by the local music shop? get a crane, hoist it up 90 feet on a quick release and auction off the right to pull the quick release.
modify a skeet thrower to throw plates intead of clay pidgeons. have people throw coffee mugs trying to hit the plates in mid air.
get an industrial shredder and let people throw old broken electronics into it, for a fee.
all sorts of crazy things like that.
Good idea or terrible idea?
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I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but here goes.
Client has a WPF/Entity application that was developed in India. Their wish list of bug fixes includes numerous iterations of the same problem that I cannot find a way to fix using WPF/Entity. It just doesn't work. I have, however, relatively effortlessly fixed it with WinForms/ADO. Long story short, I don't get paid unless bugs are fixed and I don't want to burn infinite hours on something that I know is unfixable.
I have tried telling them it's unfixable with its current design but they keep asking for it to be fixed.
What's the likelihood of them just accepting something that looks different but works?
How should I break off further involvement if they insist on using a framework that doesn't work?
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@Zenith As long as it looks newer (but not too different) and they don't have some kind of odd requirement to use a particular framework (and maybe even then if you can sell it well), I would think they'd be happy with whatever you come up with. If that's the only way to fix the bugs, then they need to remember that you're the expert they're hiring to do exactly that.
Besides that, just remember to be charming and nice in all your interactions. Be firm and confident in your expertise, but don't disparage them, their company, their software (except for the already noted bugs/lack of features), nor even their previous programmers who wrote the faulty software, because that may reflect badly on their (past, but still their own) judgment.
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So continuing where I left off...
I rewrote this entire screen because what they wanted just wasn't possible in the war zone that was the old screen. I put a little over 40 hours into it on a part-time basis. Thus far, the agreement we've been operating under is that I do some bug fixes, the client tests/approves, my contact pays me, and I move onto the next batch of issues.
This worked once. Aside from having to explain why a fix that I repeatedly said would be hard was taking so long, I don't have a problem with my contacts. It's more the client that just doesn't seem to understand directions.
Being as specific as I can, they had a screen to display, filter, select, and process records. It's basically the WebForms pattern (in a local app) where every filter change is a separate database call. The request was to keep track of selections between "postbacks." Long story short, I had to consolidate nine SPs, duplicate WHERE clauses in a DataTable expression field, and decouple alot of processing logic from the UI. Obviously, there has to be testing to make sure the results are equivalent.
So, I sent a spreadsheet, with conditions down the left (this checked, that unchecked, etc) and columns for the old and new screens. All they need to do is plug in how many records come back and the cells turn green if the numbers match. I can't get access to test myself, else I'd be a little more thorough, so this was the best I alternative that I could come up with.
I am having such a difficult time getting through to them. I explained this process several times. They ask completely irrelevant questions like why a button doesn't work, even though I told them buttons were disabled until they tested the right records were displayed (last thing I needed was to have to drive to NY to "fix" data in a weird system that I barely understand enough to patch). Then they, no lie, text me camera phone videos of the same button not working. Sometimes they're even testing the wrong version of the app after I've supplied a new version that they asked for (I have to keep updating the version number because they can't just name it "app_test.exe" for some reason). Sometimes they just go silent for over a week and I have to go chasing them only for this to repeat. I'm trying so hard to be patient and polite but I don't understand why they won't do what I'm asking.
I put about 40 hours of actual development into this as of early November, with maybe another 3-4 of this back and forth. I would really like to get paid but I'm tired of chasing them for test results that should've taken 20 minutes tops. But overall, as much as the money would help, I'm more concerned about losing out on other projects my contacts talked about after this was straightened out. It's been so difficult for me to find actual work to do locally (so many H1Bs, ghosts, and non-technical technical micromanagers) that I don't want to walk away from a chance to do something I'm good at if I can do anything about it.
Any suggestions?
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Discuss it with your contact. Tell them you're doing your best, but that the company's lack of cooperation is making it difficult for you to do your job, and that they have two options:
- get the company to cooperate, or
- renegotiate the contract to get adequate compensation for the extra work you have to do
It's amazing how telling people "if you waste my time, you're wasting your money" helps them understand that the problem should be solved.
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@boomzilla TBF, hematite is a mineral (or a synthetic, iron-oxide-based ceramic commonly and misleadingly marketed as "hematite" jewelry). In either case, it is brittle, and if you knock it against something, it's not going to bend or dent like a metal ring would; it's going to break.
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@HardwareGeek back in the day we always recommended to men on construction crews to either not wear their wedding rings at work or to get tungsten ones instead. The thought being that tungsten rings shatter when they're bent where gold and such will deform. If your hand gets smashed or crushed you'd rather not have a ring compressed around it.
Maybe hematite would have been a good alternative? It would have also been fitting for the guys that had been married a few times. Sort of a poetic representation of the ephemerality of their wedding vows?
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@Polygeekery yeah, I never wear my wedding ring when I'm doing any kind of contruction type projects.
When I was 7 years old I remember my soccer coach was putting up a net on the goal and got his ring caught and had to go to the emergency room and almost lost the finger.
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@boomzilla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Polygeekery yeah, I never wear my wedding ring when I'm doing any kind of contruction type projects.
I never wear a wedding ring at all. I can't stand wearing rings.
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@Polygeekery said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@boomzilla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Polygeekery yeah, I never wear my wedding ring when I'm doing any kind of contruction type projects.
I never wear a wedding ring at all. I can't stand wearing rings.
We stopped wearing rings before I got pregnant. I was afraid I'd blow up and wouldn't be able to get it off. That also applied to a few piercings.
Neither of us is that into jewelry (ironic for someone whose had 12 separate piercings). I don't even wear earrings unless I'm trying to look cute. Sometimes it has been so long in between wearings, I have to pop scar tissue to get the post through.
My husband does wear earrings.
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@Karla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I don't even wear earrings unless I'm trying to look cute.
You don't need any jewelry to look cute
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@TimeBandit I'm going to nickname you @ThirstyBandit.
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@Polygeekery I'm always thirsty for coffee
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@TimeBandit said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Karla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I don't even wear earrings unless I'm trying to look cute.
You don't need any jewelry to look cute
In terms of looking cute, makeup makes far more of a difference than jewelry.
I've always like the long dangling earrings. Though they have stretched out my piercing. It is now significantly more oblong than round.
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I don't know if the numbers are all there but it's an interesting idea.
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@Karla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
they have stretched out my piercing. It is now significantly more oblong than round.
Have you considered switching to gauges, then? Opens up a whole range of options.
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@kt_!!!!!!
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@boomzilla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I don't know if the numbers are all there but it's an interesting idea.
So, just to be clear: we are talking about resin-cast coasters with nudes on them, right?
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@boomzilla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
The Foglios used to use hematite rings as wedding bands. They had a small box of them on the nightstand, so when the rings inevitably broke, they had more. Sure, hematite is pretty cheap, but at some point, that's an awful lot of rings...
(Last I heard, they're not doing that anymore. I'd assume a few minor injuries happened over the years.)
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@PotatoEngineer said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
The Foglios used to use hematite rings as wedding bands. They had a small box of them on the nightstand, so when the rings inevitably broke, they had more.
That seems like a bad omen, when your wedding bands keep breaking.
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@Zecc said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@boomzilla said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
I don't know if the numbers are all there but it's an interesting idea.
So, just to be clear: we are talking about resin-cast coasters with nudes on them, right?
No. That's a different type of business venture, with a different type of value-add mechanism.
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@kt_ said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Gąska said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@kt_!!!!!!
What?
Interesting, where's my avatar? ISTR I had one… 🤔
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@kt_ said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Gąska said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@kt_!!!!!!
What?
You're in the screenshot.
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@Gąska said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@kt_ said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@Gąska said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@kt_!!!!!!
What?
You're in the screenshot.
Well, I'm right, right there. But I won't elaborate.
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@kt_ because you’re un-psyop-able and therefore it is a psy-op on the rest of us?
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@Arantor said in Ask the entrepreneurs advice:
@kt_ because you’re un-psyop-able and therefore it is a psy-op on the rest of us?
Hey, I learned a new word!
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I do not disagree with him at all. Every success and every failure starts at the top and trickles down. Good leaders hire good people that do good work and shitty leaders hire shitty people that do shitty work.
Never be afraid to hire people that are better than you are. They won't make you look bad. On the contrary they will make you look like a rockstar. Only shitty leaders are afraid to hire people who are better than they are.