Ironic that I write about failure suggesting that if you are going to do something that it is better to fail in a way that leaves a smoking crater than to just wither away and disappear.  And then bring on the clowns!

Not sure causing a financial meltdown and stuffing Western Civilization in the corner is what I had in mind.  But I guess if you are going to leave a smoking crater behind as your legacy you can’t do much better.

Because I tend to do a lot of behind the scenes work in the projects that I get nobody really sees my work.  They know if it doesnt work, but there really isnt anything to see.  This type of work tends to eat up fairly large chunks of time between spikes.  The result is that there can be a few days between deliverables which can leave customers wondering what it is that I'm up to.  To take care of this I tend to do daily updates.  This way I'm able to tell my client what I'm doing.  It also causes me to chunk my work down a little so that everyday I have something accomplished even if it can be tested in the larger system yet.

I realize most developers hate doing status reports.  So do I.  Nobody actually reads them and if things do get sideways nobody is going to care.  But here is thing - for whatever reason people actually read my status reports and as a result I tend to not get in to those sideways situations very often. 

Part of the reason people don't read status reports is because a lot of the time they contain pretty useless crap.  I've seen reports from some of the big 5 consulting companies that were chalk full of it.  Why the hell would anybody bother with that?  I tend to make mine short and sweet with short entries listing briefly what I did.  You don't need an entire dissertation.  The code is in subversion so they can go see for themselves.  Just a quick line saying "fixed the web-service so that it authorizes users based on domain group membership".  That is all the customer needs.  If they want more they can email you and ask whatever questions they need.

I also raise flags this way.  "Having trouble getting the information about the ISAM file from the mainframe group" was responded to by the PM the next day with "who are you working with?  I've talked to their manager and he says they'll help."  However, give some thought to raising issues and risks because attentive managers will show up asking questions.  Absolutely raise risks, but carefully articulate what you see as a risk and be prepared to talk about it. 

My goal with status reporting is two fold: communicate with my client and document what they are paying me for.  Ok, they’re not really paying for the status report they are paying for my solution to their problem.  But as I said earlier – sometimes I go dark for a while and I like my client to know what I’m up to.  The more important aspect is the communication.  By telling them what I’m doing and point out problems that I see I engage them in conversation about the project.  It keeps the project alive and can keep it from crashing.

Hopefully, you do something for a status report.  Don’t be fancy.  Just read the news – short, simple and concise. Your client, employer, customer, parents, kids, next door neighbor’s dog will thank you. 

If they bother to read it. ;)

Was reading a post about Cross-site Request Forgeries at Coding Horror and noticed an ad at the bottom.  I don’t usually click ads, but it promised a free book.  Who can say no to a free book?  It’s almost as good as free cookies!  Anyway that took me to SmarBear Software’s web-site where I did the usual opt-in marketing thing.  But I started looking around at their stuff: Code Collaborator looks like a pretty cool product.  I’d like to play around with it.

However, what really stuck me as cool is that their marketing campaign worked on me.  They’re giving away a book, which is a cost to them, but by doing this I’m looking at their product.  I’ll end up playing around with it and if it does what they say it does I’ll recommend it to my clients.  I’m not sure of the math for the conversion, but I doubt the book costs that much print and I the banner ads are probably pretty cheap.

Really cool strategy.  I’ll be sure to use it in the future.

 need to figure out how to put these things on CS

Photo Ticket Cameras to Track Drivers Nationwide

These two duche bag companies want to setup more cameras to spy on people under the guise of protecting us. Right...

Don't bother with the unconstitutional or privacy argument.  You are on the road and have no legal expectation of privacy.  You can be tracked and followed quite legally.  Like it or not.  All the same - I'm all for vandalizing the cameras. 

I don't think as a nation we want to go down this road.  The brits are already way down it and I think they are beginning to have second thoughts about it.  Too bad reversing course is going to be really hard for them.

What sucks is the leg humpers that run these companies don't have to convince us the public to allow them to set these things up.  They just have to sell them to the local governments which in their quest for more money will readily accept them.  The local government will then turn around and say they are doing it for our safety.  Something along the lines of "if we save just one life then it will be worth it".  This message will be delivered along with a picture of a doe eyed child holding a stuffed animal.

Anyway - this should be fun.

Last year I set out to take over the world with a tool I had developed. It seemed like a great idea. Hell, it still might be. I had written tools like it for three or four previous clients, it addressed a fairly mundane problem that most IT organizations have.

So I had written this tool, tested it, debugged it, created an installer for it. I even wrote some docs explaining how to use it. Back in the early 90s this things would have been killer! So I got the product together pretty well. I created a web-site.

And then I was completely lost. There’s a web-site, it’s right there. Customers are going to be showing up and this is going to rock. I don’t need no stinking investors. Investors, who needs them? Angles, VCs and other type of investors are just headaches and they take 90% of your work and in the end you get nothing.

Well….I got experience. I didn’t need investors for that. Overall, I’m pretty ticked about this. Not because I didn’t sell anything (didn’t sell 1 copy, in fact I couldn’t even give it away). I ticked because of the way in which I failed.

I failed because I was afraid of failure so I did not try as absolutely hard as I could have. I made a few lame attempts at marketing. I spammed some people. I did a half-assed ad-sense campaign. But that was about it. I didn’t blog regularly (never really have), I didn’t focus on technical forums where the people who influence the buying decisions are. I didn’t show it off at every opportunity. In fact, I didn’t a pretty damn good job of keeping it a secret.

I didn’t fail because I needed money. There are plenty of ways to advertise on the internet that don’t cost a dime. Just a little time. Ok, maybe a lot of time. I can’t really say for sure having not invested the time.

So yeah – failure sucks. And as I just schooled myself – fear of failure only brings about one thing: FAILURE. I’ll fess up: I really don’t want to be that guy. Which guy? You know, that guy, the one who did that thing that was so miserable it’s surprising his wrists didn’t slash themselves. So in trying to avoid being that guy, you become him. It is sort of like riding a motorcycle. People wreck on bikes because they look at the thing they are trying to avoid and they automatically steer themselves in to it. It is called target fixation. You don’t want to be known as a failure so you avoid doing anything that might cause failure so you do nothing and become known as a failure. That worked well.

Here is the thing: failure in this fashion, the go hide in a corner and quietly wither away type, doesn’t hurt right away. It nags at you, it bugs you. It calls you up late at night to remind you that you could have done something. Almost anything would have been better. It is not a sharp pain like you get when you nearly amputate the tip of your index finger. That type of pain guarantees that you’ll do things differently next time. This pain is subtler, trickier. It tries to convince you that it is ok, to just take it. It tries to convince you to just live with it. Don’t try too hard, just keep you head down and do you time.

Seriously – if you are going to fail; fail spectacularly. Make sure there is a mushroom cloud that covers at least the surrounding twelve counties when you go down. Make sure everybody knows about it. Make it worthy of a YouTube video. Be that guy. The one who went down in a screaming ball of fire that took out three city blocks. They had to call out FEMA to clean up the mess.

So here I sit having failed through not trying. Time to try it another way.

If you care to see the corpse it is over there. If you want a copy let me know and I’ll send it over (email jakew at this domain: guerillaprogrammer.com). I’m going to use the source code as part of a class I’m putting together on Windows Workflow Foundation. Figure that if it didn’t make a good product it ought to serve as a great classroom example of how to do workflows, write custom actions and do a few other neat workflow related tricks.

Oh – in NLP it isn’t failure. It is feedback. The universe’s way of saying “well that sucked”.

Doing your own maintenance is one way to save some money on your bike.  By being able to do most of the work yourself you also free yourself to shop around on parts looking for the best price.  But one of the things to think about is setting aside money upfront for all this stuff.  Oil, tires, filters, tools, all cost money.  Further, you can figure out when you are going to need these things.  For instance my 848 has 4000 miles on it now, I got it in February.  We’ve got 3 more months of great riding weather (actually late January and February are usually about the only times that it gets too cold for me).  So more than likely I’m going to need the first major maintenance done on my Duc around December or January.  I believe it is 3 hours of maintenance plus parts.  So I expect it will run close to $500.  There are also 3 track days coming up.  So I’ll probably be up for new skins too.  We don’t need to talk about the need for a new mirror.

Anyway, you know you’ll need this stuff so why not start setting aside money now?  That way when it comes time to pay, it won’t hurt so bad.

Over on Get Rich Slowly there is an article about setting up a Replacement Fund.  I’d suggest something along the same lines except I’d call it a Maintenance Fund.  You might do what they suggest selling off crap you no longer need and put the money in your Maintenance Fund.  Seriously your bike is way more fun than those comic books.

Last week I picked up a nail in my back tire.  I’ve never had that happen before and when the tire deflated it was a bit scary.  I’m moving along at *ahem* highway speed when I notice that the front end of the bike feels wrong.  It feel like it wants to go in to a tank slapper.  In case you don’t know a tank slapper is where the handle bars on a motorcycle rapidly oscillate from one site to the other to the point that the clip-ons are literally slapping the tank.  Anyway, because it is coming up through the handle bars I figure something is wrong with the front wheel.  And it is getting worse!  So I start to slow down so I can pull off and see what is going on.  As I roll off the throttle it gets worse! 

Great.  I’m going to die because there is no way I can turn the bike like this and I can’t slow down. Luckily I was able to slow it down and pull off the side of the road.

I looked and the front wheel was fine, but the back tire was flat. 

I called my wife and she brought the truck and got me home with the bike.  This weekend I took the bike in and had new tires put on.  Which brings me around to the maintenance thing.  Sorry for the long winded intro, getting a flat tire on a bike seriously stinks and it gets expensive quick (tires aren’t cheap).

Anyway, I do oil changes myself.  Changing the oil on a Ducati is an absolute pleasure.  They designed the bike so well that the oil almost changes itself.  You drop the lower fairing and everything you need to get at is right there on the right side.  No odd angles, nothing gets in your way.  The oil filter comes off easily with a strap wrench and the oil plug is in a convenient spot.  The entire process takes about 10 minutes.  The biggest problem I have is getting the right amount of oil back in the bike so that it is exactly on the full line.  And the problem is really that I’m impatient.

The next thing is that if you can remove the wheels from your bike yourself you can save a fair amount of money doing so.  Most shops charge for a full hour of labor to pull the wheels off your bike, put on the new skins and then put the wheels back on your bike.  In general this isn’t really a hard work to perform if you have the right tools.  In general.

A friend in the TSBA sold me his front stand so I’m not able to get my bike up off the ground so I can remove the wheels.  I also picked up the sockets I’d need to remove the front and rear axles (30mm front and 46mm rear).  The front axle isn’t too bad and comes off pretty easily.  The rear though…. I couldn’t do it!  The nut was so tight that even with help I couldn’t get it off.  And this is where it gets expensive.

I decided to just take the whole bike in and have them swap the wheels.  My time is better spent, in terms of money, working on building my business.  However, in the process of loading my bike in my truck, something I’ve done hundred of times, I caused it to fall over on its right side. 

Initially I thought it wasn’t too bad.  There was some scuffing on the side of the upper fairing but that was it.  Or so I thought.  It turned out that I had broken the right mirror.  It fell completely off!  So now not only did I have to replace nearly new tires because of a nail, I also need to find a new mirror.  I checked eBay and I should be able to find a new one, but damn – they are expensive.  Maybe I’ll find a way to fix this mirror.

Next time – I’ll be more careful loading the bike.  Also, I’m going to try using my impact wrench next time.  I really want to be able to pull my wheels myself and not have to have the shop do everything for me.  Big things like the valve adjustment that Ducati’s require I’m cool handing it over to a pro.  But I really should be able to do the simple stuff myself.

By the way.  I’ve mentioned before how stupid it is for people to switch to motorcycles for the better gas mileage.  Here is an example: tires.  Tires on sport bikes can get maybe 4000 miles before they have to be replaced.  In many cases it is considerably less.  Why?  Because the tires on a motorcycle work harder than the tires on a car and they have to grip better.  That means the compounds are softer.  A set of street tires for a sport bike will set you back about $300.00 plus the cost of installation.  If you can pull your wheels yourself installation will be about $30 for the set.  But if you have to take the bike in it will set you back a lot more, as much as $100.  Even just commuting to and from work you will go through 3 or 4 sets of tires a year.  If you are like me and you also go to the track and do long rides on weekend you can end up eating up a set of tires every month or two.  It adds up quick.  Even more so if you can’t do your own maintenance.  So that little bit of money you save on gas is going to get spent elsewhere along with a pile more. 

If you want cheap transportation buy a used Honda Civic.  They get 30+ mpg and run forever with nothing but oil changes.  Cheap Goodyear tires will last 30K miles and sense you aren’t autocross they will be good enough.