Entries Tagged 'blogs' ↓

Wow. It’s been so long since I posted that there is a drastic change in Wordpress versions. Let’s hope I can even figure out how to publish this. I’ve been keep busy over the last 6 months or so that I haven’t posted. However, I’m finally done school for the year with the exception of taking 1 course in the summer. Here is just a quick overview of the past 6 months, and what I’m currently working on.

• As mentioned above, I’m taking one (1) course, CP317: Software Engineering. I think I’m making a fairly good move by taking it in the summer. There are only 12 people in my class, including me, and the main focus of the course is to use the knowledge taught to complete one large group project. We decided to develop a multi-player networked tank game in Java.
• I’ve been working on a side project through my business EdgeLink Consulting dealing with VoIP and Asterisk. This is a very neat technology with a very wide range of capabilities that I’m very excited to be working with. Expect a post in the next couple of days about Asterisk.
• I was very busy throughout the fall and early winter with the musical that I’m in every year with Laurier Musical Theatre. This year it was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It went very well and I’m looking forward to the musical next year.
• I’m also working on some other side projects that you may or may not hear about in the future.

That’s about it for now. You should see something in the next few days on Asterisk and VoIP.

Dear Canadian Retailers,

I just wanted to write you a quick note to let you know that I’m going to try my best from now on to avoid purchasing items from you. This is specifically due to your inability to properly recognize that the exchange rates between the Canadian and American dollar are almost equivalent, and that your prices should be adjusted accordingly.

To support my point I would like to identify a few examples. Yesterday I walked into Chapters to buy a new book. After looking at the price on the back of the book, I promptly walked out of the store. The price was $24.99CAD and $10.99USD. This clearly is not the exchange rate. Recently I was doing research for a client on a Nikon D200 model camera. The price of the camera is $1099USD, and in Canada, is sold for over $2000CAD. As a result, my client has opted to buy it from the US, and have it shipped here. It is still cheaper, even with having to pay duty.

As far as the book goes, I decided to order it online from Amazon. I ended up paying $22.93CAD total, including shipping and taxes. This saved me over 15%. Now answer me this, why would I pay this extra 15% when it is clearly just an extra 15% markup on the price? You are taking advantage of your customers, and before long, they will start to catch on. Once upon a time this was an acceptable price because of the exchange rates, but let’s face it, the times have changed. The Canadian economy is stronger than ever, and your pricing structures should be altered accordingly.

I purchase and resell electronics from my suppliers for my clients upon their request. We make a very good profit margin on our sales, and we still beat prices by over 100% in some cases compared to retail giants like BestBuy and FutureShop. These stores can make over 400% in markup on some of their sales. The prices in the United States are still high, but they are much more reasonable.

For the time being I’m going to order the majority of my goods online from wholesalers.

Sincerly,

Dave Lahn

Upon reading a post on Jake Billo’s blog, I decided that it’s been far too long since I’ve written a post. School has been finished for a while now, therefore it is time to start updating on a regular basis. I find that if I put off writing blog posts, it just makes it harder and harder to start posting again. I would like to thank the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association for not booting me for being an inactive blog for a while.

I’ve actually been up to a lot lately. There have been many projects I’ve been working on.

• Jake Billo, Warren Gray, and I have registered our business EdgeLink Consulting
  For the past few years the 3 of us have been doing computer repair and consulting for several of our clients in our spare time. Now that business has picked up and we are conducting more sales, we decided to register the business and started operating officially. If you have any computer repair or consulting needs, please contact us through our website.
• At the end of April I started doing full-time consulting for Household China & Gifts in Waterloo
  Throughout the school year I was doing consulting on a part-time basis. Now that I am done school for the summer I have been consulting full-time. I have been working on several projects for the store, due to the fact that most of their systems are very out of date. Apart from the computer side of things, the store has undergone huge changes since it has changed ownership. The store now features a new Flower Shop, and a kitchen loft, where our full-time chef teaches cooking classes to groups. Just a few weeks ago there was a wine-tasting in the store for a group of about 25. If you haven’t been in the store lately, I urge you to check it out.
• Continuing to learn Ruby on Rails and AJAX
  I’ve been trying to keep up with all of these Web 2.0 technologies. I’m aware that Ruby on Rails doesn’t exactly match up with the power of PHP, but it has proven to be very useful in some internal web applications I’ve been developing at Household China. For the amount of users of the applications, Ruby on Rails is a perfect solution. As a result, I’ve been devoting a good portion of my time to gaining more knowledge on the framework.
• Maintaining Organization
  I’ve also been setting aside time to keep myself organized. The starting of the business has added a lot of paperwork to my calendar, and a lot of files to my filing cabinet If I don’t keep up, I can easily get overwhelmed. I’m currently using iGTD in combination with Google Calendar to try to keep track of everything. I can’t wait for the release of OmniFocus. It should make the task of keeping organized a lot easier.

I think that is about the extent of the current projects I’m working on. I’m aiming to post 4-5 times a week. We’ll see if I can keep up with this. I will make this my June Challenge.

Just a few minutes ago I found a great service called Guerrilla Mail. They provide temporary email addresses that expire after 15 minutes. I think this is a fantastic idea and I plan on using it in the future. Sometimes I would really prefer getting an email address quickly when signing up for forums than actually using my real email address. I don’t really get that much spam because Gmail is pretty good at handling it, but I like to minimize the amount of times I hand out my email address.

Tonight I stumbled upon a very interesting article about effective arguing. The article explains techniques to use in order to win any argument.

DRINK LIQUOR
Suppose you are at a party and some hotshot intellectual is expounding on the economy of Peru, a subject you know nothing about. If you’re drinking some health-fanatic drink like grapefruit juice, you’ll hang back, afraid to display your ignorance, while the hotshot enthralls your date. But if you drink several large martinis, you’ll discover you have STRONG VIEWS about the Peruvian economy.Â

There are several in the article, but this one was my favourite. Some of these may seem very simple, but when you think about it, they are very effective. Even I get thrown off when someone rhymes off statistics. This reminds me of when Stephen Colbert got his viewers to edit Wikipedia to reflect his opinion that the number of elephants in Africa has tripled in the past six months. His argument was that “If enough people say it’s true, it becomes true.”

Caller: The number of elephants has not tripled in the past six months!

Colbert: You have your opinion, I have mine.