Category Archives: Business

Business, Technology

Lost Morning Spent Trying to Install QuickBooks Pro

Three hours lost to QuickBooks installation — the solution so simple it hurts.

Took all morning to get QuickBooks Pro 2014 installed on my new computer. I have a monthly service payment plan that includes all upgrades and updates, so I thought it would be a breeze. Just download the latest version to the new machine, enter my Licence Number and Product Number and away we go.

Not so fast. The installation routine would not accept my Licence Number and Product Number, noway, nohow. So I spent about an hour digging around online support, but I no longer seemed to exist in their system. Enter Customer Number — no such number. Enter email address — no such email address. Enter phone number — no such phone number. What the @#$%!?

I then spent about half an hour getting through to telephone support. The answer? I’d been downloading the installation file from the US .com site, not the Canadian .ca site. And I’d been trying to log into my account from the US site. That’s what made all the difference.

So, Intuit, do you think you could add a few lines of code to your onlne login forms that would remind a thick-headed bozo like me that I should go to your Canadian site? You know, a little popup that says “that does not appear to be a US phone number, please check your country of purchase.” And “that customer number does not exist in our US database, please check your country of purchase.”

A simple reminder like that could have saved me hours of frustration.

Business, Sustainability

Creepy Consumerism

Now and then I’m hit with a creepy feeling of being on the set of a horror movie in which beasts are ravenously consuming everything in their path. The feeling is reminiscent of the short story read in school “Leiningen Versus the Ants” in which a plantation owner battles columns of army ants that are obliterating every living thing in their path. The other classic reference is to locusts. Masses of locusts.

The feeling hit me a few days ago in the cafeteria at the huge IKEA store in Coquitlam, BC.

The previous time that I felt such a wave of near revulsion was at a WalMart Superstore.

In each case I felt overwhelmed by excessive consumption. I was part of it, to be sure, but that just exacerbated my squeamishness with guilt.

In the IKEA situation, it was the steady flow of people through the cafeteria, chowing down on thousands upon thousands of meatballs, fish sticks, and tons of potatoes––mashed and French fried––not to mention the gallons of gravy. I envisioned how many times this scene was being replicated at IKEA stores around the world. Repeated day after day.

As for WalMart, it was a woman with not one, but two shopping carts stacked to overflowing, hyperventilating on a shopper’s high. She was near incoherent with consumption-induced euphoria, babbling to nobody in particular about the “deals” she was getting. I envisioned how many times this scene was being replicated at WalMart stores around the world. Repeated day after day.

I don’t mean to single out the above two companies. Choose your poison. We could add Costco and most any other major supermarket chain to the mix. Remember when Canadian Tire, was, um tires and other automotive stuff? Have you been to any of the new two-story monsters recently? Just another superstore with tires and batteries on the side.

I understand this all provides jobs. I understand that we live in a consumer-driven economy. What I don’t understand is how we can keep this up in the long run. Our national economy, our global economy, is a pyramid scheme that is dependent upon endless growth. Pyramid schemes are illegal, and doomed to failure with some poor sap eventually left holding the empty bag. That sap may be all of us.

Business, Nature, Society, Sustainability

Urban Sprawl — Are Humans Less Efficient Than Slime Molds?

“History suggests humans, in contrast to ants and slime molds, rarely optimize growth, particularly when multiple objectives such as profit, equity, and ecological integrity come into conflict.” And since we aren’t quite as good at this as slime molds are, there is the distinct possibility that we should plan for the worst rather than assume we’ll fix the problem ahead of time. – Dave Levitan | August 5 2014

Thanks to Pamela Zevit for posting this quotation, and the article it came from, on FaceBook. Pam posts links to a steady stream of articles that make one sit up and think.

Business, Streamkeeping

Yet Another Poorly Designed Survey

Just took a survey sent to me by an NGO resource organization. I like to be helpful, so I often take the time to answer surveys.

The survey was mostly about HR, and as I worked my way through the questions I kept typing in that our streamkeeper society is 100% volunteer, with zero employees. Finally, the last couple of questions in the survey included “how many employees do you have?” Why the heck wasn’t that one of the first questions?

And then the last question was what category did our annual budget fall into. The lowest category was less than $500,000/year. Seeing as our annual budget is $1,000 (the amount of our annual grant from the Fisheries and Oceans SEP program), that was the category I chose, but damn! Out by 500X, eh?

Business, Fishing, Food, Nature, Streamkeeping, Sustainability

Small Sockeye This Year?

I bought our first wild sockeye of the season at Save-On Foods in Burnaby, BC, today.

It was small, weighing in at 0.686 kg, or about 1.5 lbs. Of course that’s sans head and guts, but it still appeared undersized. All of the sockeye at Save-On looked small. Certainly way smaller than the pinks I fished on the Fraser last year.

Come to think of it, the fish looked not much bigger than a coho jack — a male coho salmon that returns to spawn a year early.

According to the DFO Tidal Waters Sport Fishing Guide, a sockeye “usually weighs between 2.2 kg and 3.1 kg, but can reach 6.3 kg.”

UPDATE: I’ve been looking into this online, Googling and reading academic papers, and have come to the conclusion that while small, this fish was likely not an outlier.

Most research and reporting on fish sizes and weights presents “average” ranges, and it’s hard to find information about what the usual minimum weights are. However I did find the following on the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada government website:

“Commercially caught sockeye range in weight from 2 to 9 pounds and are graded according to size: 2-4 lbs., 4-6 lbs., and 6-9 lbs.”

So I guess that 1.5-pound dressed fish was not an outlier.

Business, Fishing, Nature, Streamkeeping, Sustainability

Shocked to See Byrne Creek in SE Burnaby Milky for 2nd Day

Image

I was shocked to see that Byrne Creek in SE Burnaby, BC, was running milky for the second day in a row. You can see my photos from yesterday below in an earlier post.

This is the third day in a week that someone has been discharging something into the creek. Volunteer streamkeepers haven’t seen any dead or distressed fish, but this amount of sediment occurring so frequently cannot be good for life in the creek.

The City of Burnaby has been swift to respond, sending out staff to try to backtrack the sources of these illegal discharges. Of course staff cannot say much while investigations are ongoing, but I hope they are successful.

While a fine or two would be great to make perpetrators sit up and take notice, I am generally not gunning for punitive measures. Education and outreach are key in the long run.

UPDATE: As of late afternoon, City staff had traced the source to a broken line on private property that was seeping and carrying silt into a drain.  As is often the case, it was unintentional, and will be fixed.

UPDATE 2: As of 6:30 pm, I received a report from another volunteer streamkeeper that a “deluge” of water was passing through Griffith’s Pond, and that she had contacted the City of Burnaby, and had been told there was a watermain break somewhere upstream. How many hits can this poor creek take in a day, much less in a week?

Here’s what Griffith’s Pond near Edmonds Skytrain Station looked like as of 7:00 pm tonight:

still milky byrne creek

Business, Society, Technology

New Battery Rejuvenates Cell Phone

I began noticing a few months ago that the battery in my Samsung SIII smartphone was not lasting nearly as long as it did when new. I was getting barely a few hours out of a charge.

I was in Toronto in early June for several conferences, and was using my phone more than I usually do to keep in touch with local relatives and friends, read my email, check Twitter and Facebook, etc. At home I do many of these things from my office computer, so hadn’t noticed as much how weak the phone battery was getting.

I had an hour to kill over lunch one day, and tried four or five cell phone retail outlets in downtown Toronto, and none of them had a battery for the SIII. It’s not that old, but old enough in the rapid model turnover of the cell phone world that none of them could be bothered to stock batteries for it.

I returned home, and put up with the shorter and shorter battery time, until the last day or two the battery wouldn’t take hardly any charge at all. I could leave the phone plugged in overnight, and have less than a quarter bar of battery power in the morning.

About a week ago I ordered a new battery from an online battery shop, but yesterday and today, I could not get more than a minute or two out of a charge. So I searched for battery specialty shops in Burnaby, and came up with Battery World on Boundary Road. I called them, and they had four SIII batteries on hand.

So I drove over this afternoon and bought one. Staff encouraged me to pop the non-Samsung branded battery into my phone and make sure it fitted properly and powered up. It’s nice to see a full bar of power on the screen again, and it’ll also be nice to have a backup battery when the one I ordered online arrives.

The new generic battery also has a tish more  capacity than a stock Samsung battery at 2,300 vs 2,100 MaH, but I haven’t had the opportunity yet to see if that realizes more uptime per charge. That’s only around a 10% increase, so I doubt if I’ll notice a difference.

It’s amazing how one becomes addicted to technology. If I leave the house without the cell phone, or if I’m out of juice, I feel naked. And I’m not a power user by any means. I might make and receive half a dozen to a dozen calls on my cell per week, and about the same number of texts. I am using it more for email and GPS location finding than I used to.

Oh, yes, I’d also like to thank Samsung for making batteries easy to change. Just pop the back cover off the phone by sticking a fingernail in the slot, and there you go — easy access to the battery, SIM, and microSD memory.

Books, Business, Editing, Photography

Paul’s Photo Tips – Tip 2 – Read the Manual

1 Comment

Learn Your Camera – Read the Manual

This is obvious to me, but it seems few people read manuals for anything.

Do you know what every button on your camera does? What all those menu items are?

I strongly encourage folks to read their manuals, and follow along and practice changing settings on the camera. Don’t worry that you may “screw something up.” More than likely there’s a single menu item to return everything to default settings.

Manufacturers put hours and hours into developing manuals. I occasionally get work editing manuals translated from, say, Japanese to English (I’m a freelance editor with some connections in Japan).  I know how thorough and detailed the process is for developing manuals that are accurate, readable, and understandable.

I try to skim my camera manuals every year or two, and always find stuff I’ve forgotten, or have never tried. You might be surprised by features available on your camera that you may have not known existed! I keep the manuals out in a prominent spot in a bookshelf in my office, and delve into them from time to time.

If you find the manufacturer’s manual dry, publishers like RockyNook offer books on how to use, and get the most out of, popular camera models.

Of course digital cameras also come with software, and that software also has a manual. Yes, I’m going to advise reading that manual, too!

But I’m not going to get into the software side now.

Have fun reading!

What? You threw out your manual?

Go to your camera maker’s website and download it (they’re nearly always free to download even if you haven’t registered your camera).