Not What I Expected

The Web Comics Conundrum, or "Am I paying for past or future performance?"

I read a lot of webcomics, and comics on the web in general. I have subscriptions on two of the syndicate sites, I was one of the first set of subscribers to User Friendly, and if there's a collection of the comics available for sale, I'll buy it.

And I'll put money into the tip jar. Which is where the problem begins....

As I said, I read a lot of webcomics. And there's been a lot of webcomics either go dark or go fallow (I don't count it as dark until either a couple of months have gone by, or the 404s start showing up) in the past few months, and they have always preceded the disappearing act with a plea for money. Usually it's because the person or people running the webcomic are pretty much doing this for a living, and the funds aren't coming in. Yes, I know I'm paying for someone else to freeload on the site if I hand over the cash--in most cases, it's worth it to me.

But the current group of fade-aways are asking for money after the comic has either cut back on schedule--dailies go to 3 a week, 3 a week go to 1 a week--or the schedule has turned into "whenever". I've even seen pleas for cash with a statement that the writer/artist will then go away for a month, crank a bunch of comics, and come back with the finish to the current story arc.

The thing is, when they go away for the month, they just don't come back. Now, someone is just being less than honest here, and I'm not saying they're running a scam. In all likelihood, they really, really intend to come back, except:

1. They've run into writer's block
2. They have "professional" contracts that keep them busy
3. The artist or writer has disappeared, and the partner can't find a replacement
4. Life has intervened, and they just don't have the cycles anymore
5. The whole thing has turned into a grind, and it's no fun.

Hey, been there, did that, did not get a t-shirt. There are times that life slams you along the side of the head, and whatever you've been doing is just not going to happen.

But you know, if I've been paying all along, and the webcomic shows definite signs of sputtering to a halt, these days I'm having a lot of thoughts before putting money in the tip jar. Is the extra money a "hey, thanks and good luck!" or paying in advance for future goodies?

Is retail doing that badly?

Is retail doing that badly this season? At the stroke of noon, I received email from Talbots and  LL Bean inviting me to check out their clearance sales.  Yea, we're past the time any of the catalogers can deliver for Christmas, but  this is just a bit much.

This doesn't bode well for the quarterly numbers in retail--it looks like they're trying to get as much stuffed in the sales pipeline as they can before the quarter is over. If they can grab it from "brick and mortar" before the 26th, all the better.

As Roberto Luongo Feels a Chill

According to the reports. Mike Keenan "resigned" from the Florida Panthers earlier today. According to the wire services, the owner of Panthers knew about the pending resignation

The good news--the Panthers don't have to put up with Keenan's scheduled meltdown in his third season as GM.

The bad news--Keenan's in play. and given that in the past Keenan has "resigned" knowing he has a place to land, anyone who's on a team that has a GM in doubt ought to start telling the press and anyone else who listens what a wonderful GM Ferguson/Nonis/Pick_a_GM is.

And if Keenan announced or even broadly hinted as to his intentions to the Panthers' owner, then chances are that Keenan has at least a sniff that there's a GM job up for grabs. And given that there is already noises out of Toronto that Ferguson is on a *very* short timer, well there's no smoking gun, but there sure are lots of 9mm holes in the wall, and air has a sudden sulphuric perfume to it.

Ah yes, the CBC can look forward to all those Saturday nights with Keenan telling them the state of the Leafs. They can assign a sound engineer to attest that yes, Keenan's voice does keep getting higher the deeper in hockey-doo he's gotten himself. Maybe they can arrange a cage match between Keenan and Strachan--you know, something for after the Queen's address on Christmas!

But until Keenan lands, a lot of players will be looking over their shoulder, pulling their sweaters a little tighter across their shoulders, and *wondering*. And feeling a small chill.....

Fruits of Summer

Well, not quite, since the Aprium (yes, that's right--it's a plumcot crossed back with an apricot.) is allegedly a spring fruiter. In any case, the stone fruits have been late and not as sweet this year. The nectarine tree out back this time last year had already delivered, having started to drop fruit at the end of July. Right now I am starting to get the first of the fruit, and they're pretty splah. That last sugar load just didn't happen.

Same with the Aprium. It should fruit in late May to early June, and it really didn't get going until the second week of June, and even then, there wasn't a lot of fruit, and what there was, was small. The Asian pear decided to not fruit at all this year.

However, my mum's peach tree, which is just outside of Chicago (along with Mum) has fruited and gone. Go deal--Chicago has had some hot weather, but it hasn't been a hot summer there, either. Mum's freezing the neighbour's Clingstones, as they produced like mad, giving everyone a bunch of extra fruit. *Someone* out there is having a good summer fruit year!

We were talking yesterday about fruit and such, and I brought up the "new" watermelons--you know, the "personal sized" variety? Had to laugh--those are pretty much the original size field watermelons came in, at least up north, and it was the nice people who thought we needed 25lb melons for the fridge and picnics The seedless, or more accurately, less seeded varieties are a *good* thing, though.

And speaking of melons, my melon vines decided t produce this year. These are usually my "stretch goal" in the garden, as it doesn't get and stay that hot here. This year I have another Canadian cultivar that's supposed to handle cooler nights. I have five cantaloupes currently getting ripe on the vine. I think this one is a winner!

And I just noticed as I typed this--there are two gold leaves on the Aprium tree. The Aprium loses its leaves first, but wow, that's early, even for it.

The "IT Upgrade" for the UK National Health Service that isn't

In this weekend's BBC and Financial Times sites, there's the latest on the disaster in the making otherwise known as the "IT Upgrade" for the National Health Service (NHS). The numbers are staggering. The Financial Times reports that the project is not only two years overdue on completion, but the costs have swollen from £6.2 billion to nearly £20 billion. And here's the phrase that pays from Lord Warner, the health minister who is overseeing this travesty:

The extra money did not mean the programme would cost more than expected, he said, but instead reflected the full expense of switching existing IT spending from outdated systems to the new ones. (Financial Times)

and

The delays to the electronic care record, which mean it may not be in place until early 2008, come in part because of delays in providing the software, which is being developed by iSoft and other companies. (Financial Times)

So, the schedule was under-scoped by years, and the true cost of the implementation was just sort of left out of the original plans?

And while the electronic records systems (aka, the customer database) is now over two years late, the same group has been rolling out and promoting the appointment system to GPs, with equally disastrous results. According to a survey by BBC's Radio 4, 85% of the GPs questioned said there should be "an independent review of the entire scheme by technical experts to check its basic viability." That's not having the same people who implemented it taking a look and saying that it looks fine to them. Even more telling regarding the appointment system--of the 80% of GPs who have access to the system, half said they either don't use it or rarely use it (BBC).

And the response on this? From Dr Simon Eccles, who's overseeing the project: "Our view is that we are already under enormous scrutiny, political financial and otherwise. We would be happy with further scrutiny, providing we don't delay the project further while answering yet more questions to explain why the project is delayed." (BBC)

Oh my--nothing like a veiled threat to make your customers feel like they are in the loop. Or maybe no a veiled threat, but a hope that the whole mess can be rationalized away by pointing to all the scrutiny that happened when the customers took a look around and decided that things weren't right.

Hands up, anyone who's thinking that the fox is indeed guarding the henhouse. Here we have a project that is overdue, over budget, without decent oversight, and the reaction of those responsible are to hand-wave around the numbers, and hold their client group hostage against any possible remedy.

So, what to do? The biggest problem is that there is a lot of money invested in this project as it is--if you decide to pull out, something has to be done about those funds. I'm not an expert on accountancy in the public sector in the UK, but I'll guess that depreciation of capitalized items may not be an option. In fact, when I see a statement like "full expense of..." that tells me that there's little to no capitalized funding going on. In one way, that's good--you don't have to play the depreciation tango with Finance. On the other hand, you get to take the hit all at once, and someone is going to be asking questions about all that money. And all that money is on the wrong side of the balance sheet. Even taking into account the difference between a British billion (100 million) and a US billion (1,000 million), that's like Bruce Chizen telling his shareholders that Adobe lost all of their sales revenue for the next two years in a botched IT expenditure. If you were a shareholder, which the residents of the UK *are* in the case of the NHS, wouldn't you be asking for a really good explanation of exactly what happened? And then voting the one in charge of the disaster out of office?

In any case, I'd be asking how all of this managed to spin out of control. Very rarely does a project of this size suddenly find itself over budget, late, and with unhappy customers. It had to get there somehow. This speaks for why a project of this size needs to have someone who knows about the technology, and in this case, the technology is customer databases, and someone who can act as independent oversight to the project. It's not evident that there were milestones for this project, nor were there "out of bounds" or "go/no-go" definitions and tracking available. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that there was a very helpful person with an MPP (Microsoft Project) files, happily showing progress in the coding until at some point the code needed to show up for some form of user acceptance. And that's when they found out that it didn't fit together in one large piece. In fact, it likely didn't fit together at all. And at that point, they saw how much they had invested in the project, and made the decision to throw money at it, as well as keep a forward momentum, with promises made that it all was just around the corner.

But that corner never came, and they had to release *something*. And that something was the scheduling software. And the reaction to that software led to questions, and those questions led to the realization that things were, indeed, two years behind and massively over budget.

And now they have to deal with it.

Picking up the prescription: world-class stupid marketing

I went to the pharmacy this morning, because I had called in prescriptions last Friday, and they said they would be ready for today. Yes, I think waiting that many days for a refill is pretty poor service, but the last time I tried to have the prescription mailed to me, it never showed at all, and previous to that, it took over two weeks. This is the same place that will only refill a prescription when you have ten or fewer days left of the medication.

So, I show up and wait in line. The pharmacy has finally created separate lines for "called in/used the website" prescription fills, vs people who just show up to get their prescription filled. That's one point in their favour, but I want to see how that works when there are bunches of people there, and not enough clerks. The trouble is, I don't want to actually have to take part in the experiment.

I get to a clerk, and after checking the bin, he tells me that they lost one of the prescriptions, so I had to wait for them to do a refill. Whee. I sit down and wait fifteen minutes for my name to be announced.

I tried to pick up my prescriptions, I really did. But I was told that since one was new (the one they lost--this is a prescription I've been taking for over a year) I had to go talk to the consulting pharmacist. And of course, there's a line over there, too.

After listening to the conversations before mine--the HIPAA people can now come after me for having excellent hearing and a low boredom threshold, and I was standing where I was supposed to stand, but if half the conversation is going to be at 125dB, everyone is going to hear it--I finally get a chance to talk to the pharmacist. Well, yes, there's a note on the prescription that I can either take it all at once, or split it into two doses. No, I take it all at once. I've been taking it like that for over a year now. No, it's not a new prescription, it's just when the refill was lost, the system they had tagged it as "new". Oh, okay--never mind, then. And he hands over the prescription bottles.

And on the lid of the prescription that was lost, and then erroneously tracked to consulting, there was a sticker: "Save time next time by calling in your prescription!"

Somehow, I don't think so.....

I am seriously unhappy with Sprint

You know, when I knew that they are the "old" GTE, I shouldn't have signed up with their service for my cell phone. They were a piece of crap back at Purdue thirty years ago, and they continue to be close to worthless to me.

My cell phone connection from my home office has been, at best, spotty for the past three weeks. It used to work fine. Now I'm just as likely to get a "roaming" as not when I attempt to actually use the phone to call someone. And text-messaging, which I use a *lot*, is a complete crap-shoot.

So, what happened? I'd guess that a cell tower is no longer working properly. Sprint doesn't say anything about it--in fact, while they claim they have a tower in San Jose, if you look at their map, it says there isn't Sprint PCS service in this area. Lots of roaming, and for some reason, there's Sprint PCS all through the central valley--even beyond the I-5 corridor, but nope, nothing in Silicon Valley.

I'd have to say their cluelessness extends to their maps. Not a happy thing, since I depend on accurate maps to check on coverage while I'm on the road. And "assume you'll have no service anywhere" really doesn't work for me, on so many levels.

So, how did two companies (Sprint and Nextel) manage to make their coverage and support *worse* by merging? That's a corporate mystery.

"Have Gun--Will Travel" Ages Well

With hockey over by 8PM every night, and most of the baseball I care to watch doing the same, I have some time to check out DVDs. Chuq and I ordered the first set of episodes of "Have Gun--Will Travel" from Netflix. I just finished the first DVD last night, and I have to say that the series has aged very well. One of the things that struck me was the ability to inject a lot of moral ambiguity into the stories--there's more than one time where "Paladin" (nom de guerre? This and a lot more was left unanswered throughout the series) bends words or uses logic arguments that would have shamed Melvin Belli to get what needs to be done, done. Paladin is on the side of the Angels, and that may or may not be on the side of the law.

BTW, take Paladin, darken the character about 100 times, and you have Col. Douglas Mortimer from "For a Few Dollars More." Right down to the Colt 45 custom job.

Have Gun--Will Travel shows what you can do in the constraints of telling a story in 22 1/2 minutes. You can tell that with some of the writers (including a pre-Star Trek Gene Roddenberry) that they hadn't quite gotten over writing for radio. Especially in the pilot, there are pregnant pauses in the dialogue that would have been filled with expository dialogue, so the radio listener would know where Paladin was at the time. And I was happy when they lost the music bridge at the end. The standard "this is a western" song just doesn't work with the Bauhaus qualities of the rest of the production.

It also shows that 50's television can't be broken down into two classes--"Requiem for a Heavyweight and Ernie Kovacs were genius material" and "My Gawd, there was a lot of crap in the 50's". There's good stuff out there, and with any luck more of it gets released. From what I've read, CBS has been dealing with copyrighted music, a problem that has been blocking releases of other old programs.

Rethinking my position in the metals market

You know, when Pat and Ron discuss silver futures during the Cubs broadcast, maybe it's time to rethink my position in the market.

I don't think this means it's going to crash, but I do think it's going to get even more volatile than it has been. Anyone who's trying to play the spot market or day trade in silver is taking a much bigger chance that they'er going to get seriously burned. It's like finding yourself at a blackjack table with people who barely understand the rules--they'll do stuff that makes no sense whatsoever, and nail everyone else at the table for their trouble.

Too bad the copper and zinc markets are even a worse mess.

Geez, maybe I ought to wait for Bay Meadows to re-open and try my luck with the horses. There's probably less chance of someone stumbling in and randomizing the race.

(technorati tags: silver, baseball,futures)

MLB site strikes again

I was surprised that this season, MLB (the site that deals with the online multimedia products from Major League Baseball) didn't barf into my lap on opening day, as it has every past season. No, it decided to wait until today to deal me dirt.

I clecked on the multimedia tag to open up a browser window for the radio broadcast of the Cubs game. The first message I received from the site was that they didn't support my browser, which is safari, and that I should use either firefox/netscape or MSIE. Oddly enough, it's been working fine with Safari until this morning.

Then it told me that I didn't have a subscription. Unfortunately, I have been paying these idiots for their miserable service since MLB decided to take the games from the radio stations streaming them, and put them on a "pay for" service. Believe me, I'd be lots happier if the Cubs games were still on the WGN radio site, and I didn't have to deal with changing services to go from the pre-game to the actualy boradcast, and then back again. Not that I'm going to get that, though.

So I check my credit card statements. Nope--MLB, even though they had told me they were going to automatically charge my card, hadn't. I've learned that attempting to deal with MLB's alleged "customer service" is a no-win game. The customer service script they use is to tell the customer (note--in many cases, the customer has paid for a service they aren't getting) that they are completely full of shit, and don't know what they are doing. I've had these conversations, from "it won't run on a Mac--get a Windows box", to "there's a problem, I don't know when it will be fixed", followed by a hang-up. Nice guys. They mlb.com people know they have a monopoly, and once they have your money, they don't have to care.

So, it's time to pay up. I finish the process, and check my mailbox. ALong with the "thanks for your money", I see a "if we weren't able to charge to your credit card, we cancelled your account w/o telling you, and we started it back up again" email. Now, *there's* customer service--first they use the negative option for renewals, and then they kill off accounts without telling the customers when they can't get the charge to go through. Ever hear of contacting the customers? There must be a reason, other than selling account info and sending advertisments, that you require email addresses, right?

I had hopes that with XM, I'd be able to get away from this stupidity, but XM is following the "play one feed from the game" model. Maybe once compression and bandwidth improves, I can hope for a "pick your broadcaster" option. I'm looking forward to it.

And to Bud Selig, self-described technophobe, who according to the New York Times, admits that he can't point his browser to the MLB website: Bud, get someone who understands e-commerce, electronic product delivery, and who actually gives a damn about the customers, and have them manage the site. Given all the grief that's currently comng down in baseball, can you really afford to anger *more* of your fanbase?

(technorati tags: baseball, business,ecommerce)