Posts Tagged “geeking out”

In case you haven’t got enough to occupy your brain cells, here’s a question for the moment:

Is this extra day of February profitable or not?

Here’s my thinking. Some revenues and expenses are monthly, so they’re the same in a regular February, a 29-day Feb, and in regular 30 and 31-day months. Other items are hourly or daily or usage-based, and therefore earn or cost more in leap Februaries than in regular ones. Let’s stipulate that February 29 does not fall on a weekend, or at least that it’s a business day.

For most people and businesses, rent and payroll are the biggest budget items. Rent is pretty much always monthly and the same every month. Ditto mortgage payments, assuming interest is compounded in equal months, which I think it is. That makes February, leap or not, more expensive on a daily basis, but makes a leap-Feb a little cheaper. For example, $1,000 in rent is $32.26/day in 31-day months, $33.33 in 30-day months, $34.48 in a leap-year February and $35.71 in a regular February.

Payroll is more interesting. Those on annual salaries see the same effect as rent - you earn a little more per day in February compared to other months, but a little less per day if there are 29 days in the month. If you work an hourly job, you earn one an additional day of pay in a leap year. Of course, you also work one more day. If you earn commission, you have one more selling day in February to make your number.

Back on the expense side, some monthly charges are constant - insurance, cable TV, tuition - but others are more use-based and will cost more in a leap-Feb - food, electricity, gas - although they should still be cheaper than in 30 and 31-day months.

So, as a business, should you open or close on 2/29, and as a worker, should you bother to go to work on leap day? We’ll restrict our analysis to comparing a leap-year February to a regular one, and not compare any February to any other month.

As a businessperson, my biggest expenses (rent and payroll) are monthly constants, and the leap day gives me an extra selling day, so I should be happy to open on 2/29. Even with hourly workers, the extra selling and constant rent should make the leap-Feb more profitable than a regular one. Unless, of course, the business is operating at a loss - in that case, the leap year February is more UNprofitable than the regular one.

As an hourly worker, the leap day is a small windfall. I get paid for another day’s work, maybe earn more tips or commission, and my biggest expense, rent, is constant for the month.

As a salaried worker, my calculus is trickier. If there’s commission at stake, I’m more like the hourly worker and should consider 2/29 a good deal. If not, then all my large expenses - and my monthly pay - are constant, and it goes to the small stuff to decide. For example, if I have a commute using expensive gas, the marginal profit on the day starts to slip away. On the other hand, staying home on a cold February day could run up your home heating bill compared to enjoying free heat at work.

On balance, I find that the leap day is marginally profitable and will not advocate for its abolition on economic grounds, nor will I incite leap-day strikes. In fact, I rather like the leap day. It’s an example of the uneasy truce between the human desire to put rational order to things and the universe’s insistence on being just the way it is, a reminder that our planet zips along at its own pace no matter what the pope or the IRS says.

Happy leap day.

Are we alone? Nobody watching? Good. I want to tell you about a secret blog. (Don’t arch your eyebrow at me, KC, this isn’t about your secret blog) I’ve been working hard at migrating Ipswitch’s Daily Network Monitor Blog from its current Movable Type install to a shiny new WordPress setup. Here’s the old DNM, and here’s your secret preview of the new one. (of course once the cutover is complete, both links will show the new site)

The DNM blog has been a little neglected of late, but we’re getting back on daily posting, and with the new setup, I think it’s going to be a serious SEO force for the main product site. Here are some technical reasons why this is going to be so:

• Moving the blog from an Ipswitch-owned domain to a hosted domain will give it some separation and make the links from the blog to the company site more valuable
• Taking advantage of tagging and categorizing makes it easier for bots to understand what the site is about, and also creates more pages for indexing
• WordPress’ easy architecture will make it possible for us to extend the web visitor tracking system to the blog to better understand the flow of traffic
• Updating the social bookmarking links - digg, stumbleupon, delicious, reddit, etc. - will help get the site noticed (and it wouldn’t kill you to use them to spread the word about limeduck, either)
• and most importantly, getting more technical posts and some guest authors will make it more readable and commentable

I have to give lots of credit to the tools and vendors here. You already know that WordPress is excellent, and that I dig the Mandigo theme. What I’ve also discovered is that the folks as BlueHost have an amazingly easy to use system for automatically installing and setting up WordPress on your hosting account, and their tech support people are actually clueful and available.

Well, that’s enough geeking out for now. Look for the new Daily Network Monitor soon, and expect some of the learnings to come back and enhance the limeduck experience, too.

I sometimes rankle when people ask technical and process questions about how I make photos rather than talking about the aesthetic content. But let’s face it, the photos of late haven’t exactly been art, and it presents an opportunity for some tech notes.

I’ve been carrying my usual film camera, but won’t get the film back for several more days so let’s talk about the digital shots. Geek notes on my film process another time. I’ve also been carrying a T-Mobile Dash and using it to take 1.3MP digital photos - largely of food - and email them to the blog. (With Blogger, you can set up an email address, yourblogname.secretword@blogger.com which posts anything you send to it, which is a lot easier than using a mini web browser on the Blogger site.) The photo quality is just good enough for quick and dirty documentation, and the keyboard and connectivity are just good enough for quick and dirty blogging. There’s a convenient setting in the phone for reducing the size of photos (1.3MP = 1,280×1024 native) to save bandwidth, which isn’t cheap when roaming on GPRS. But it has an odd side effect.

Here’s the photo from the recent tomato post, as originally displayed by blogger:

The odd thing is that there’s an IMG WIDTH tag set for 320, but the image is only 300 wide, so it looks fuzzy. Let’s remove that tag and look at it at 300 wide.

A little better. I wasn’t expecting much from a little phonecam, but when I looked at the photos on my iMac, I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s a comparable size reduction saved at a much higher quality. The 1.3MP file was 332k, the phone crunched the file to 16k for emailing, this version is 128k.

And finally, here’s my usual treatment with some color correction and cropping.

That’s more like it. Yum. Now, the question is, should I go back and re-do the photos from the last ten or so posts? I already went in and removed the IMG SIZE tags, but I see there’s more that can be done.

So I’m working on the slides for my upcoming appearance at Baptie’s Direct Focus marketing conference in San Diego. It’s hard going of course, this will be a tough audience. And you know what happens when the going gets tough… the tough geek out on some unrelated topic to procrastinate.

Over the past month I’ve traveled thousands of miles and given hours of presentations. My constant companion has been an excellent gadget that I’m going to take a moment to recognize: the Mobile Edge Slim Line Wireless Presentation Remote, pictured here a bit larger than life-size.

I was shopping for a different remote, one recommended at Presentation Zen, when I found this one by chance. I can’t say enough good things about this device. It’s small (stores in your laptop’s PC card slot!), it’s simple (only six buttons), it works anywhere, anytime (with a usb thingie built in), and it has a “laser!” What more could you want? Check out the engagingly cheesy flash demo on Mobile Edge’s site.

My only critique would be that the buttons make an audible click when you press them. It’s likely that this is audible only to the presenter, but you never know. I guess the slogan “bring it on” printed on the device is also a bit creepy, but I can forgive that bluster because the whole kit is so nicely engineered. What really makes this device sing for me is the form factor - the USB dongle stores inside the remote itself, and the whole thing stores in your laptop’s PC card slot, making it nearly impossible to lose.

Unless, like me, you forget that you put it in your computer’s PC card slot in the first place. Funny how things are always in the last place you look for them.

Back when I lived in San Francisco, I lived near Van Ness Avenue, a wide boulevard from which it was very difficult to make a left turn. People trying to make left turns on or off of Van Ness would often cause traffic to back up. I complained that these people should just make three right turns and not cause so much trouble. If anybody asked, I would advocate making left turns on or off two-way streets illegal.

So, imagine my joy at finding this piece in Time magazine:

United Parcel Service took a detour to the right on its way to curb CO2 emissions. In 2004, UPS announced that its drivers would avoid making left turns. The time spent idling while waiting to turn against oncoming traffic burns fuel and costs millions each year. A software program maps a customized route for every driver to minimize lefts.

In metro New York, UPS has reduced CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons since January. Today 83% of UPS facilities are heading in the right direction; within two years, the policy will be adopted nationwide.

As much as I like the geeked-out contrarian wing-nut logic, I fear this might be a canard. Not that I have anything against canards, in fact I love them, especially here and here.

1,000 metric tons of CO2 sounds like a lot, but the market price of a ton of carbon offset is only $3.70 at the Chicago Climate Exchange. Although I can find much higher prices for a ton of carbon offset - up to $50 at some European exchanges - $3,700 or even $50,000 is not an impressive savings for months of UPS driving in NYC. I bet the savings from switching to CNG or hybrid delivery vehicles would dwarf the right-turn dividend.

But on the other hand, if this seemingly sinister policy reduces the time I spend waiting behind trucks trying to turn left, I can’t complain.