Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Category: Business

  • Gasoline Tipping Point

    I finally reached the tipping point. Since I biked to work yesterday and stayed up late, I really wanted to drive a car into work today. Kind of like a day off between going to the gym to allow the muscles to relax and recover. However, as I headed out the door, the thought of paying $90 for a fill-up made me head back into the house, put on my fluorescent yellow biking jacket, pick up my helmet and head off on my bike. Saving the environment or preventing climate change in the far off distant future is one thing. Keeping those precious dollars in my pocket right now is another.

    This ties in with a post on the Consumer Reports Money Blog I spotted a few months ago about banning the $100 bill. My opinion? The $100 bill is the new $20. I used to be able to fill up the gas tank with a $20. Of course, gasoline was 99 cents a gallon back then. However, nowadays, I need a $100 bill to guarantee a complete fill-up. The thing is, in the above photo, the gasoline tank wasn’t completely empty. If I needed to squeeze in two more gallons, I would have pushed it to the century mark. Yikes!

  • Sustainability

    New York Times: Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average. Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country. But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

    I used to think that sustainability meant eating less meat, installing a photovoltaic roof system, and substituting native, drought-tolerant plants for a wide expanse of green grass. All worthwhile endeavors, but many people find it hard to surrender a tangible benefit today for some uncertain and unseen benefit tomorrow. No more. Sustainability is no longer about surviving is some distant future, but about surviving today. Even if you don’t live in the South or Midwest, the steady increase in gas prices will still crimp your wallet (or purse) and start to affect your decision-making processes.

    A few months ago, I spotted this piece of advice on Ken Rockwell’s website titled How to Afford Anything.

    I’ve never commuted by car.

    Call me wishful, but I’ve made this happen by only applying for jobs in places near my home, or in places to which I’d enjoy moving. I would never apply for a job someplace in which I would not want to live.

    I’ve always taken my bicycle, or walked.

    That is true sustainability. The ability to survive despite unrelenting increases in gasoline prices.

  • Recession or Stagflation

    Gas PricesIf you think a recession is bad, think twice. Stagflation is even worse! The last time a recession paid us a visit was when all the Silicon Valley dot.coms started imploding. Suddenly, I found it easier to commute to work and find parking at Cupertino Village. This time around? It’s worse. Over Memorial Day weekend, I visited Los Angeles and noticed a number of large Chinese restaurants that had closed down. People aren’t eating out. The drive to L.A. was also surprisingly light. I thought I had to leave early to beat the traffic but, as it turns out, there wasn’t any traffic to beat. So, with fewer people driving around, I experienced my first bout of sticker shock when I pulled up to a gasoline station this morning. Gulp! $4.19? Why, I just filled up for $4.01 about a week ago. If retail gas prices go up 20% more, we’ll be at $5.00. And just last year, I was complaining about gas at $3.09/gallon. Those were the days.

  • Make Money by Losing Money

    I received a bill for $0.86 from the City of San Jose. Seriously, some city official should calculate their costs for mailing a bill and processing the payment and determine whether certain sums are better left uncollected. The city sent their bill as presorted first-class mail. So, their postage costs will run between 32-36 cents. Let’s say the envelope and paper cost 1 cent each, so the city is already losing 34-38 cents from this transaction.

    Next, I have to pay the bill. However, I have no interest in mailing an 86 cent check with a 42 cent stamp on the envelope. Sure, why quibble over a few cents, but the postage costs will increase my out-of-pocket expenses by 49%. So, I try to pay the 86 cents via my banks online payment system. Free postage! But, the bank requires a minimum payment of $1.00. So, I end up paying the extra 14 cents so that the bank can pick up the postage tab.

    However, I suspect that my extra 14 cent payment will throw off the city’s accounting system. I’m betting that they will end up sending me a check for 14 cents, paying another 32-36 cents postage, and everyone will be happy.

    Except, the city will have spent at least 68-76 cents trying to collect their damn 86 cents. I certainly hope their bill processing system is automated, else they’ll lose some more money entering the data into the system and cashing the check. In all likelihood, this will be a net loss transaction for them. I think the City of San Jose should have just written off this amount and engendered 86 cents worth of good will.

  • Office 2008 and Office 2007 Compatibility Headache

    I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. The Europeans believe that Microsoft is a bad actor that cannot be trusted. When a third-party application encounters compatibility problems with Microsoft software, the Europeans automatically attribute some nefarious monopolist motive to the Redmond behemoth.

    But, what if Microsoft was just incompetent and not ill-mannered? How else can one explain the compatibility problems between the two latest versions of Microsoft Office? I downloaded a Microsoft Word file that was encoded in the new .docx format. I opened the Word document using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition and I didn’t see any formatting issues. However, when I viewed the same document using Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Windows), the document was formatted differently. Specifically, spaces that appeared in the Mac version of Office did not appear in the Windows version of Office. How can this be?

    After some testing, this is what I discovered. When I saved an Office 2008 document in the .docx format, Office 2007 stripped out some of the spaces. By some, I mean a lot of spaces, including spaces between words as well as a series of leading spaces used to align text. If I saved the same document using Office 2008 in the .doc format (i.e., Word 97), I had no portability problems between the Mac/Windows versions of Office.

    So, you tell me. Are incompatibility between Office 2008 and Office 2007 due to evilness or incompetence?

  • Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M Rocks

    The ScanSnap S510M Scanner is awesome. In one night of use, I managed to clear most of the documents off my desk that had accumulated over the months and, shamefully, even years! The scanner comes bundled with Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager, Cardiris 3, ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. It also comes with all the necessary cables (i.e., power and USB) as well as a carrier sheet for problematic documents. Basically, the carrier sheet is two transparent pages that may be used for torn or other damaged documents that may jam the automatic document feeder.

    Assembling the scanner was a snap. Next, I installed the ScanSnap and ABBYY FineReader software. I already have Acrobat installed and I don’t have an immediate need to scan business cards. With that completed, I place a document on the feeder, tap the scan button on the scanner, and the scanner scans the document. The ScanSnap application then prompts me on how I would like to process the image. The choices are Scan2Folder, Scan2E-mail, Scan2Print, iPhoto and ABBYY Scan2PDF. I’ve only used Scan2Folder and ABBYY Scan2PDF. The difference is that ABBYY Scan2PDF will OCR the scan and make it searchable. Scan2Folder just saves the scan as an image inside a PDF file without performing any text recognition. I didn’t see any option for scanning to Adobe Acrobat. However, when I checked the “Do not show this menu again” box in the ScanSnap Quick Menu, the scans defaulted to Adobe Acrobat.

    If you want all your documents to be searchable, then running them through ABBYY or Adobe Acrobat makes sense. However, character recognition takes time. So, at first, I routed a few documents through ABBYY FineReader. However, in the end, I used Scan2Folder because the OCR was taking too long and I had too many documents to process.

    Speed. The ScanSnap S510M is an extremely fast scanner. It also scans in duplex in one pass; i.e., it can scan both sides of a sheet of paper at once. Simply amazing.

    Settings. If you right-click or control-click on the ScanSnap Manager icon in the dock and select Settings, you can change the default save folder for the files. You also would want to change the Paper Size setting by clicking on the “Scan mixed paper size” box. This allows you to place a stack of different sized papers into the feeder and have them all come out as one document. Not sure why this setting is not the default.

    Auto Straighten. Don’t worry if your document wasn’t feed in perfectly straight. I ran a receipt through the scanner that got pulled through slightly askew and the software straightened it out without any user intervention.

    Quite simply and absolutely amazing product. If you use a PC instead of a Mac, the PC version of the product is Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

    Usually, Amazon.com will tell you about available rebates at the time of purchase. In this case, I had to find the info on the Fujitsu website myself. The current Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M rebates include a $50 mail-in rebate and a free copy of Readiris Pro.

  • Costco Rations Rice

    We reported last Saturday (April 19th) that Costco was rationing rice purchases. At the time, we didn’t realize that we scooped the regional and national press.

    KPIX issued a similar report on April 21st, two days after us. The Huffington Post/AP reported on the Costco rice shortage on April 23rd.

  • Watches are Obsolete

    ForbesLife has an article about watches for the 21st century. Unfortunately, the online edition lacks the photos contained in the print edition. So, you have to look elsewhere to catch a glimpse of a $1 million plus Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4 watch. Actually, I don’t get it. Not just the price tag, but watches in general. I think watches and clocks are obsolete as stand-alone products. Well, except for the alarm clock. Other than that, I can track the time throughout the day by looking at the microwave oven, thermostat, car dashboard, cell phone, computer, etc. Haven’t worn a watch in years, and I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon.

  • The Finger

    The FingerStopped into 7-11 this afternoon and got The Finger. It’s actually a Butterfinger rebranded as The Finger for presumably an April Fool’s prank. As part of the promotion, the wrapper says “Go to Yahoo! and search ”THE FINGER” To find out more!” Besides the Butterfinger ad, Yahoo! also suggests: “Also try: the middle finger.” Uh, great marketing stunt, I think.

  • Cookie Cutter Marketing

    Peanut Butter SandwichMarketing works. Why else are we drilled to not judge a book by its cover? Sometimes our marketing ideas work. Other times, they are a complete failure. And, you will never receive a more honest response than from a child. If they don’t like what you prepared, then they don’t eat it. One easy way to make sandwiches more appealing is to use a cookie cutter. Suddenly, a regular peanut butter and jelly sandwich is transformed into a person, heart or a star. On one level, it makes no sense. Same bread. Same peanut butter. Same jelly. But, cut it into the shape of a gingerbread man and it’s delicious.

    Keep that in mind the next time you are facing a challenge at home, work or elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with your sandwich. It’s just the shape of the sandwich. A minor change can dramatically transform your product or career.