corvairflair

Words for those who may care

Archive for September, 2007

It’s good to get out from behind a desk

Sep 27

Posted by Mike in Home Renovation, Personal | No Comments

In the past month, since leaving my full time job, I’ve been able to get a taste of…well, manual labor. I’ve always liked working with my hands and have always prided myself on being handy. Now that I can sort of dictate my own work hours I have been catching up on my honey do list.

Don’t get me wrong, when you are a home owner there is always something that has to be done around the house. But being that we’re currently having a major renovation completed on the house (building a new garage), I’ve gotten a taste of some real heavy lifting, literally. From hauling some major loads, placing some major structural elements, framing, roofing, not to mention coordinating a lot of other efforts.

I haven’t tackled this project on my own (I have a carpenter on site), I’ve still gotten to get my fair share of work in and I have to say it feels good. At the end of the day, it’s nice to be able to walk away from something and actually see what you’ve accomplished thus far.

Standards Schmandards

Sep 16

Posted by Mike in Commentary, Design, Development | No Comments

Well I finally finished (well almost) coding the website I recently designed. Being the anal perfectionist that I am, I wanted to make sure the site was XHTML strict compliant and validated correctly. Being that this is a very small our page site, I figured coding would be a breeze. Wrong, wrong!

Enter IE 6 and well, many hours later, I believe the site is working in this browser. I wish that when standards are published, they would be utilized by everyone, so there would actually be standards. I know this is a pet peeve of most developers and thousands of others have posted similar articles. But now that I’ve gotten to experience it first hand I realize how frustrating it has been to constantly tweak and hack code to fine tune your layouts so they display the way you intended within the major browsers.

I did at least find some nice tools and sites to assist me through this episode. Browsershots.org is a site that allowed me to test my code on many different platforms and browsers by taking screen shots of the pages I submitted. And this is a free site. I also posted on The Scripts Developer Network. This is a great developer resource with many articles, how-to’s and a great forum to post issues and questions.

So all in all, it has been a great learning experience, although quite frustrating at times, but at least the site is has been posted. It’s still a work in progress. I am trying to add a php mail to form and am tweaking this as I write this.

So if anyone out there has run into similar experiences and has other sites that may be of interest in this realm, I’d love to hear about them.

What ever happened to a little thing called…

Sep 6

Posted by Mike in Commentary, Personal | No Comments

…customer service. I know this is certainly a topic that has been discussed time and again, but once again I am dumbfounded by the lack of common courtesy that is amiss in many of the businesses I deal with on a daily basis.

Let’s start with the US Post Office. Currently I am assisting with an online photographic services company, efotolab.com. As part of my daily routine, I pack up photos to be shipped by our friends at the post office. When I arrive their, the line is typically LONG, and gets LONGER as I wait for someone to simply take my packages. While I understand they’ve got their processes that they need to follow, I would hope part of this process isn’t moving at sloth-like speed. Much to my dismay, I believe this is protocol. In fact, as I stood in line once again last week, one of the clerks joyfully boasted “Everyone knows that if you’re in a hurry you shouldn’t have come to the post office.” Service with a smile!

This is just one example of what I’ve been experiencing with regards to customer service from both retail businesses as well as service oriented ones. I don’t get it. I have always been of the mind set that you need to treat your customers/clients with respect and professionalism. Not only are they the people supporting your business but ultimately they can be the best referral you have when it comes to getting more business. so it stands to reason that you want them to remember the good and not the bad.

I guess when you have such a corner on a market, i.e. the US Post Office, you can rest (and I do mean rest) on your laurels. Maybe some of this attitude will catch up and bite some of these guys, but i doubt it.