Corporate slip-up

David McGrath wrote a local view, “A few ‘no thanks' are in order today".

I sent him a note of thanks, but when I sent it, I realized that the address was wrong.  The first four characters of his address were not included.  In the Olive Edition of the DNT the email address was split.  (Olive is software that displays the printed edition as is and then will open up single articles.  It has many of its own problems.)

I thought it might be that the opinion editor was being careless.  That would be ironic because he always seems to find something to change in almost all of my letters or commentaries.  So much so that I have given up sending anything to the DNT.

I looked at the DNT on my iPad this morning, but I am using my MacBook Air to write this blog entry.  The Olive Edition opens with an error on this computer, and nobody has fixed the problem yet.  So, I looked at the web edition, and surprise! The email address is correct at the bottom of the article.

That means that the opinion editor probably never saw the result once it left his computer to the automated process to be put in all the various formats.

And probably nobody double checks all of these errors because the owners won’t provide enough resources to check and correct all of these irritating errors.

Software glitch gives ambiguous headline

The following is from the Olive edition of the Duluth News Tribune, 2014-12-19:

leaderskilledinairstrikes Three top Islamic State

This is the headline given when one asks for an expanded view of an article.

Just what does is mean?

“Leader skilled in air strikes”

or

“Three top Islamic State leaders killed in airstrikes”

This kind of headline frequently appears in the Olive Editions of both the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune.  The Olive Edition is the newspaper as printed with the user benefit of expanding a page or a given article.  Really neat when it works.  But too often, a page is blank for several minutes.

The irony is that both the Duluth News Tribune and Star Tribune frequently have front page stories about problems that MNSure may be having.  Granted, this garbled headline problem is a minor nuisance compared to delays in accessing MNSure, but...

Personal and corporate screw-ups

I received a letter today from Minnesota Revenue that I still owed income taxes for 2013.

My first look at my spreadsheet didn’t find anything wrong.  Maybe the state wasn’t considering the tax withheld by payers to us.  When I looked further, I had put fixed data in a worksheet rather than linking to a figure elsewhere.  Ouch!

I won’t let the state off entirely.  The letter only listed the estimated tax payments I had made, not the tax withheld.

As I was adjusting my spreadsheet, Microsoft sent a notice that upgrades to Office were available.  I waited for these to be downloaded and installed, and then continued my correction of my tax spreadsheet.

The download or my correction may have been a big mistake.  Excel crashed twice!  The restored spreadsheet looked was altered in bad ways.  Not only were the fonts in some cells changed, the size and shading of a window was changed.  The resulting sheets were ugly!

Speaking of spreadsheets, I won’t let Apple get off the hook.  For some reason, Apple has not included named cells or groups of cells in Numbers as in Excel.  One has to use an obscure coding using a page name and row numbers and column letters.  At least, if one changes the location of the cell or group, Numbers does adjust for the change.

Spam français

For francophones, here is the text of an email I received this past week; the email gives itself away as spam.  For francophobes, an explanation follows.

Chér(e) client(e)

Nous vous informons que votre compte arrive a expiration dans mois 48 heures, il est impérratif d'effecteur une vérfication des vos informations prérsent, sans quoi votre compte sera détruit. Cliquez simplement sur le lien ci-dessous et ouvrer une session ' l'aide de votre Apple ID et de votre mot de passe.

Vérfiez maintenat.

Merci, L'assistance a la clientéle Apple

This email is filled with misspellings: dropped letters and unaccented letters.  It is misdirected; what makes the sender think that I have a French Apple account.  And the dead give-away that too many gullible people miss, one never acts on a strange email that asks for the recipient's password (mot de passe).

Check the data of those claiming proof of whatever

Many are claiming that high national debt leads to a decline in growth.  According to Mike Konczal, this claim is based on a paper whose results cannot be replicated by other economists.  See "Shocking Paper Claims That Microsoft Excel Coding Error Is Behind the Reinhart-Rogoff Study On Debt",  Business Insider, 2013-04-16.  Among other things, the authors of the study have not released the data they used to determine their results and that they didn't use comparable data from one country to another.

Unfortunately, "This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget states their study 'found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.'"  And the Washington Post considered it a consensus view of economists!

But the debate doesn't end here.  See also "New Research Undermines The GOP's Austerity Agenda", Jeff Spross, Think Progress, 2013-04-16 and the rebuttal from Reinhart and Rogoff, "Critique of Our Work Still Confirms What We Found on High US Debt", Rob Wile, Business Insider, 2013-04-16.

Beware the pitfalls of automatic spell checking

Automatic spell checking can be a very helpful tool, or it can be a very embarrassing tool.

Twice in the last week I have posted blog entries that had some glaring errors.  The errors were words that I am sure I didn't type.  Whatever I did type was changed by the spell checker in
Apple's TextEdit, my writing program of choice.  My wife pointed out two of these as errors, after I posted them, of course.  One I just found out about, she had left a message on my cell phone on Tuesday.  Another assumption, nobody calls my cell phone.

Two lessons here.

Proofread everything you write, and then proofread it again, and then have somebody else proofread it.  And even then something can escape everybody's notice.  I've read well-written books by famous authors with glowing acknowledgements for all the people who helped including reading drafts, and still the books have had glaring errors:(

Always check your cellphone for messages.  Being buried in pocket or purse can muffle the ring tone, especially if you set it at low.

Corporate bureaucracies eat into other corporations' profits

I've often said that government has no corner on bureaucracy.  Almost any large organization, for-profit, non-profit, government, has a large bureaucracy.  They have to in order to look into many, many details that are needed to run the organization efficiently.  You read that right, an organization needs a bureaucracy to be efficient.

Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing?  Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees.  Who is going to pay and collect the bills.  Certainly not the executives.  Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.

One corporate bureaucracy is customer support.  These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions.  When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization.  When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy.  The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.

A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.

I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".

Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions.  Hoo Boy!  Talk about non-responsiveness!  This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.

Well, maybe there was some resolution.  Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared!  How often are regular meetings changed in your organization?  Sometimes changed meetings become the norm.  What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed?  Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!!  Wow!  That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement.  Guess what?  When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.

What a way to run a railroad or any business!  I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.

How dumb can I get?

When I went to bed last night my nose was a bit stuffed. I looked for the nasal spray in my toilet kit and couldn't find it. I couldn't believe I had left the nasal spray on my dresser at home. I did have an inhaler and used it. Now I could go to sleep a bit more comfortably.

This morning when I was ready to put my contact lenses in I found the nasal spray. It was on the counter where the lens solution should have been. The lens solution was still in my toilet kit! At least the nasal spray is saline solution and doesn't have menthol and other stuff that would make my eyes burn.

I used the lens solution liberally before putting the lenses in. No problem so far.

I wear old felt boot liners as slippers in the cabin. One seemed to catch as if I a carpet square was up. I'd move my foot and it wouldn't catch again. But this kept happening. Finally I saw that there was a thread coming out of the liner. I pulled the thread up. It was stuck under a box. I moved it out from under the box. It was wrapped around a chair leg. I untangled it from the chair leg. I followed the thread. It was under another chair leg. I picked up the chair and the thread; finally I had found the end. I pulled off the slipper. The sole and upper were not joined from the big toe to the arch! The thread wouldn't break; I had to cut it with scissors. I hope my wife can fix the liner; they are cozy in the cabin.

This morning as the inside temperature dropped quite a bit, I started another fire. But why was it so smokey? Ah, yes, the air intake was partially closed and the damper was shut. Smart people pay attention to details.

Oh well, I took a walk this morning on a trail we haven't kept up for a few years and I remembered all of its twists and turns. I exaggerate a bit. It was the third time I've been on that trail this fall. A few weeks ago we walked it with some friends. Even though several landmark trees had fallen; deer and other animals had used the trail enough to give me a sense where the trail was.

Last week my wife and I walked it and placed yellow flagging tape at several places. Today when I walked it, I couldn't always see the next bit of tape. That was because I had walked forward to pick a place for the next bit. I could see where we had placed the last bit, but I didn't think we might not be able to see the next one from the previous.

I did spend a bit of time noting how the landmarks had changed. For example, I knew we had gone through a thicket of alder, went past a couple of large balsam, stepped over a fallen tree, and then bore left into a grassy area. Animals had changed the path to go above the alder, and the two balsam had been uprooted. Today I was able to identify that place by spending a bit of time looking around.

Am I an expert woodsman. Far from it. But when you do certain things over and over again, you can retain memories long afterwards. Now if I can only find the old trail that went east from where this trail turned west.