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Why Apple is Doomed

Why Apple is Doomed

In the long term, the death of Steve Jobs will be the cause of Apples impending downward spiral. In business they say everyone is replaceable. I never agreed with that statement, surely most are replaceable but there are always the few that can never be replaced. Steve Jobs was one of those individuals. I personally admire Steve’s minimalist approach to design. While at the time of writing this, the only Apple products I own are an iPod and Apple TV and surely I have Steve Jobs to thank for those great toys, but what he gave me far exceeds any hardware or software. Steve’s philosophy on minimalistic design will always stay with me. If its not needed, don’t add it. In programming there is one underlying quote to follow, “simple is beautiful.” Steve understood that, possibly better than anyone else in the tech field. When I design now, I always keep that quote in mind. Design should be simple and elegant, if its not needed, don’t add it. So thank you Steve, yes I love my iPod and Apple TV, but what I admire most about you is your simplistic approach to life and design.

How can Apple possibly continue to innovate and create products that are so user friendly without their leader? I’m not sure they can, but they have a great line of existing products that will continue to get updated under Tim Cook. I think Apple will continue to have success for at least another 5 years based on the residual success of its current product line, but as for new and innovative products, I can see them falling short and it does sadden me to say that because in the world we live in today, we need companies like Apple to compete with Google and Microsoft. Competition in the tech world only leads to greater innovation and greater advancements. I truly hope I am wrong and I hope Apple continues to innovate and create new and exciting products, but I see the death of Steve Jobs as being the beginning to a long downward spiral for Apple. I think we are already seeing it with the recent release of the Apple iPhone 4S. You know if Steve had been involved with the project there would be no 4S, it would have been 5 and it would have been awesome. Instead Apple drops the 4S which has received less that good reviews with many saying there is little to no improvements from the 4 to the 4S.

The world lost a great innovator, a man who can not be replaced. Neither your a PC person, a Google person, an Apple hater, etc. You still have to respect Steve Jobs for what he did to change the world. He brought a sinking company back to life and his products and ideas will continue to inspire the world for years to come.

Joey’s Diner Amherst NH

Joey’s Diner Amherst NH Review

Joey’s Diner located in beautiful Amherst, NH is anything but beautiful. Its a traditional 1950′s diner with full decor, but you can’t help but notice all the wear and tear from the seats to the grease stains on the floors and walls. Overall the atmosphere is typical and predictable, but Joeys Diner in Amherst NH really needs to spend a few hundred hours cleaning the front end.

The food Joey’s Diner in Amherst NH was ok, nothing special. I do like how they offer breakfast all day long and my Girlfriend enjoyed her meal, mine was ok, but for the price of the food I was expecting a little more, especially when there’s another diner down the street called Nathaniel’s Family Eatery in Nashua, NH which has better food and better pricing.

Probably the worst part of Joey’s Diner in Amherst NH was the service, the place was dead when we arrived and it took a good 5 minutes to be seated, the front end waitress seemed half dead, maybe she was having a bad day or working a double, but she was very rude and cold and inattentive like she didn’t want us to be there. I worked in the restaurant business for years and I was not impressed. Upon sitting us she took our drink orders and took a good 15 minutes to return to take our meal orders. While we were seated another worker started cleaning the windows and tables with a strong smelling detergent that made the dining room smell like ammonia. Hey Joeys Diner in Amherst NH, maybe you should wait till close to use harsh chemicals instead of making your gusts have to suffer right before they eat or worse while they are eating!

The service continued to get worse at Joey’s Diner in Amherst NH. The server never came back once to ask us how things were going or to refill our advertised FREE REFILL drinks. In fact she was nowhere to be found. She was probably doing her side work out back so she could leave. She finally came back to drop the check off and although we rarely order desert, I found it unprofessional that she didn’t even offer us a desert menu or try to up-sell a desert, it made us both feel like she wanted us to leave. Regardless, she the type of service we received and the cleanliness of the place was enough to turn us away from returning.

Joey’s Diner in Nashua, NH should be featured on Kitchen Nightmares or Restaurant Impossible, I feel like Joey’s Diner has potential, but they seem very run down. I hope someone from management reads this and take this criticism and turns the place around. Please clean your restaurant and tell your servers to me more attentive like they actually want jobs in this tough economy!

Is Groupon Dead?

Is Groupon Dead? I suppose it depends on how you define the word dead. Groupon boasted impressive numbers in 2010, but 2011 has been horrible for the company who has been losing 100′s of millions of dollars per quarter! As Groupon prepares its IPO many speculate if the company could survive without it. Groupon’s failure does not come alone, lots of these fast growing start up companies seem to have a massive following accompanied by a swift collapse. In Groupon’s case they are spending far too much on marketing which could be the death of the company.

Last year Google made an offer to purchase Groupon for 5 billion dollars… Groupon passed on the offer, which in my opinion was a complete mistake on the CEO’s part. With hundreds of these special daily deal sites launching like LivingSocial.com Groupon’s idea is becoming less unique by the day. Groupon is nothing more than an over glorified newsletter and after receiving a few emails from them myself about daily deals in the boston area I quickly unsubscribed from the list because I found it very annoying. Thanks I get enough spam. Groupon is dead.

My philosophy on e-businesses is that there are room for the 2 or 3 big gorillas in every market, after that everyone else is just a wannabee or they die off. In this case, Groupon is the big gorilla, but I think the problem with this industry in general is the business model, it is unproven and unstable. Groupon may be ok with the IPO, but its long term success will be based on how they adapt and how they can help merchants increase profits in this tough economy. Merchants will try anything once or twice to make capital, but if the service fails them its unlikely they will return. Groupon can pull it together, or they can die off. In my opinion though, Groupon is dead.

Cindy Fitzgibbon is Always Wrong!

Cindy Fitzgibbon from Fox25 Morning News is always wrong. I watch the news every morning and listen to her forecast and I’ve been keeping track of how wrong Cindy Fitzgibbon is. Nearly 62% of the time her forecast is wrong, but what makes it worse is her attitude. She acts like everything she predicts is right.

Cindy Fitzgibbon is always wrong. Cindy Fitzgibbon says 4-6 inches of snow, expect none or 12+ inches. Cindy Fitzgibbon says heavy rain, expect sun or a dribble. Cindy Fitzgibbon says hurricane, expect a rainbow.

I have concluded that whatever Cindy Fitzgibbon says in her forecast, just expect the opposite.

Cindy Fitzgibbon from Fox25 morning news is always wrong!

Screen Printing White Ink on Dark Fabrics

Some things to consider when using white ink…

I’ve found 110 mesh works best, I will go as high as 156, but on dark fabrics your going to need multiple layers.  Also you can double coat your screens with emulsion to built a thicker layer of ink, this can be helpful (but not necessary) to print white on black.  I buy my white ink very opaque which works great on 110 mesh, but for 156 mesh I’ve had to use an additive to thin out the ink prior to use, otherwise it will have a hard time getting through the screen.

If your going to do white ink prints, make sure you have a good supply of black construction paper, you can get it cheap online!  Printing white on black is so different than printing black on white, it requires more patience and more technique.  Keep practicing and experiment with squeegee pressure until you get a result that works for you.  More often than not, your going to need to put down more than 1 layer of ink so its best to first flash dry your shirt to preshrink it, then put your first layer down, then flash dry, then put 2nd layer down and do 1 more final flash dry.

iPoke T-Shirt by Ina Zejnati

Want attention? Wear this shirt!  Who needs one liners when your shirt says it all

iPoke T-Shirt

Screen Printing – Proper Off Contact

Your new to silk screening.  You’ve completed all the steps to creating your first screen and it looks good!  Your finally ready to print, you place a shirt down, lower your screen and squeegee your first print, you lift the screen and the image looks blurry, thick and very unprofessional… You’ve done something wrong, thinking it might be the screen or the equipment you panic, throw a few things across the room, curse at the world.  If this has happened to you read on.

First, its probably not your equipment and if your screen image is sharp and presentable its probably not that either.  Instead its either your squeegee technique or your off contact.  What is off contact you ask?  Off contact is the distance between the screen and the surface material your printing on. You’re aiming for 1/16 of an inch,  anything more or less could result in a bad print.  So what is 1/16th of a inch?  Its about the depth of a penny.  So adjust your equipment so that you have proper off contact.  You can also tape a penny to the screen so it lays on the platelet away from the design area.  This will ensure you keep proper off contact.  Also remember to use spray adhesive to keep the print material to the platelet, sometimes with opaque ink the ink will bond to the fabric and lift the fabric with the screen resulting in a textured thick print.

Good luck!

How to properly store CC numbers

If your looking to start a online business which will need the ability to accept Credit Cards, there are a few things you should consider before attempting to properly store CC numbers.  You will need to become PCI compliant (read more here https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/merchants/index.php) as well as developing a system for storing and deleting CC data.  Some common questions you need to ask yourself before you begin might be,  Why am I storing the data?  How long should I store the data?  How will I delete the data?  Who will delete the data?  What kinds of data should I store?

There are a few reasons you might want to store CC data,

1 To make future purchases more streamlined  for the customer (Before storing customer CC data, you should always ask permission.  You will find that the majority of users do not want their data being stored, respect their decision.)

2. You want to set up reoccurring billing ensuring the successful payment of scheduled services. (Before you plan on storing CC data, research your gateway.   Some gateways have API’s on reoccurring billing which results in  you not having to store anything!)

3. You want to keep the data in the event the customer returns product and requests a refund. (Some gateway companies do not require any additional information to issue a refund from their terminals.  More commonly though, they will require partial data from the original transaction.)

The most common reason for storing CC data and the one we are going to talk about in this article is #3 – storing CC data in the event of a refund.  Before you begin you need to read your gateway API documentation which will tell you some of the tools and methods they allow for issuing refunds, doing reoccuring billing, etc. To issue a refund, most popular gateways only require the original transaction ID along with the last 4 digits of the customers CC number.  If you are unwilling to store CC data then you will need to request the customers CC data in the event of a refund, this should never be done via email, email is never secure.  Although I’ve found that calling for CC data brings up its own risks including customer trust issues.  For this reason I store only whats needed to complete a refund.

One of the best methods of storing CC data for refunds is to store the transaction ID along with the last 4 digits of the CC number for a limited time.  When you have this data you can use the gateway terminal to issue a refund without any additional information from the customer.  For advanced systems you can  even create your own module  for refund management which makes your life and business more efficient.

Most gateway companies only allow refund requests up to 90 days after the original transaction date,  so in theory storing credit card data longer than 90 days is foolish.  To be PCI complient, the fewer the people who view the customers CC data the better.  Building a robot or script to run a scheduled cron job that deletes old CC data is a great option! Keeping the original transaction ID however is a good idea so keep that and delete everything else.

An example of a simple function that deletes CC data might be

$now=time();
$deleteCt=cleanCCData($now);
echo $deleteCt.’ orders have been cleaned’;
// instead of printing the results, you could create a report and have them mailed to you

function cleanCCData($now){
$buffer=60*60*24*90;     // 90 days
$delete=mysql_query(“UPDATE SQL_TBL SET ccDetails=”  WHERE $now > (orderDate + $buffer)”);
$results=mysql_affected_rows();

return $results;
}

An example of what you might store to the database is below (this is the unencrypted version)

Transaction ID:      102234545
CC Type:                       VISA
Card Holder:              John Smith
Exp:                                  10/14
CC Num:                        XXXX XXXX XXXX 0989

In the above example, we store some basic information about the credit card and transaction.  We do not store the entire credit card number, instead we store the length of the card number only showing the last 4 digits which will be needed in the event of a refund.  It’s also best practice to never store the CVV information.  Again, the information above would need to be encrypted before being sent to the database.  Because the information is incomplete and otherwise useless to anyone except the gateway payment processor, it is now safe to store (again after being heavily encrypted).

Conclusion: Storing CC data is no joke and should not be taken lightly, even if your using a purchased shopping cart system or CMS, you need to know what kind of data is being stored  Remember, as a merchant you are responsible for your customers data.  If your system gets breached and data leaches you are responsible.  Treat customer data the way you would want your own data to be stored, when it comes to security there can never be enough measures.  This article covers only a very small part of storing and handling customer CC data.  There are several other things to consider such as Pre-Processing using the Modulus 10 algorithm to ensure the CC number is formatted correctly and  setting up a series of pre-authorization checks to determine if an order is legit.

Computer Geeks Do It Till It Gigahertz T-Shirt

New Computer Geeks Do It Till It Gigahertz T-Shirt just released today.  This is our first shirt made with vellum, it came out really good. Get it while it lasts. 

http://www.topfeuds.com/Computer-Geeks-Do-It-Till-It-Gigahertz-P-74.html

Computer Geeks Do It Till It Gigahertz T-Shirt

Vellum Paper vs Transparency Paper for Silk Screening

Recently I have been experimenting with Vellum paper and its potential to replace transparency film paper for silk screen negatives.  So far I’m impressed with the quality.  Vellum paper is less expensive and prints great on our ink jet printers.  I have noticed though that it requires a longer exposure time.  I was exposing it at the same time as our transparent films and noticed the edges didn’t seem as sharp.  When exposing vellum paper you should add an extra 15% to your exposure time.  The major pro for using vellum is the price.  Before we were spending about $1/sheet for transparency film paper.  With Vellum its about $0.10 and the over-sized vellum paper 11″ X 19″ isn’t much more expensive.  Vellum is a great alternative to transparency paper!