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No MyAlRecMo. Yet.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

The fates have conspired against me and forced me to postpone December as my month to write and record an album. I’ve had some gear malfunctions, had to completely disassemble the studio due to a move, and ended up needing to be in Texas more than I had originally planned on. That said, I plan on spending some of the holiday time doing some writing and getting the studio back into shape. I’m now shooting for somewhere in Q1.

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MyAlRecMo?

Thursday, October 15, 2009

You may be familiar with NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month,” in which people are encouraged to overcome their own personal inertia and write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I’ve been intrigued with the idea since I first heard about it a few years ago, but fiction writing has always been an area that I’ve studiously avoided. I have enough trouble self-critiquing my lyrics and declaring them stupid before I’ve even finished the third line — I can only shudder in horror at the thought of reading over my own fiction.

Still, the idea is sound and something I actually wrote about in a song to myself back in the late 90s:

You don’t know what you can do until you do it.
And you won’t know what you can get through ’till you get through it.
There’s a world waiting for you, go pursue it.
There’s nothing left to stop you, so go to it.

For awhile it worked, but I’ve been in a funk for over six years now and haven’t written a thing worth mentioning. I’ve started thinking about music more and more lately, though, and NaNoWriMo has the right idea. It’s defined. There’s a ticking clock. There’s a clear measure for success.

I first thought that, in solidarity with my literary bretheren, I’d would tackle the musician’s equivalent of writing a novel — recording an album — in November. Then I remembered that I’ll be in Texas for 20 days of it. While I’ve gotten a pretty decent mobile studio started down there, it’s not quite ready for all of the work I’d need to do.

So I’m shifting My Album Recording Month back to December. I’ll be in Milwaukee for all but four days of it, so the time is good. What I haven’t quite decided yet is whether this will be a brand new set of songs, reworkings of older stuff, or something in between. I also haven’t decided what kind of music it will be or if I might do some pre-production work ahead of time. The main thing is that I want to have final recordings either on their way to CD duplication or making their way to something like the iTunes online store by the end of 2009.

I’ll be keeping a diary of progress here, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

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The New Math

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I know it’s an era of Obamanomics and new math that somehow makes it possible to spend $800,000,000,000 and simultaneously reduce the deficit without raising taxes, but even in the middle of all of that, I think credit card companies have finally gone completely crazy.

I opened a GM Card in… oh… 1991 or so. It seemed like a pretty good deal – I got a certain percentage of money back that I could apply directly toward the purchase of any GM car. Well it seemed like a pretty good deal at the time, anyway. Now it’d be kind of like getting a discount on a Pacer.

So I’ve had this card for 18 years (or thereabouts). It’s never been my lowest interest rate card, but it wasn’t too bad either. I used it as a backup card and rarely carried a balance. It was useful when Mary and I wanted to track total project costs as we did recently. I put about $6,000 on the card three or four months ago and have paid that down to $900: a fairly typical pattern that must make them salivate because my credit limit keeps going up.

Seriously, it’s almost stupid. $21,000 stupid. I once called them and asked if they could reduce my credit limit. After they got finished laughing, they told me that 1) nobody had ever asked that before, and 2) no. I didn’t worry about it, though. I minded my business and they minded theirs. I never could figure out if it was good or bad for me to have a card with that much room on it from a credit score standpoint but I’d had it a long time, which I know is a good thing.

Over the last several years, Mary and I purged our super-high interest rate cards and the GM card, at around 16%, became my highest interest card. Again, not worried about it, as I hadn’t carried a balance in years and paid it off quickly whenever I used it.

This weekend I got mail (that’s pre-printed email for you youngsters out there) from HSBC, the company behind my GM credit card. They explained to me that Great Things™ were about to happen.

  1. My monthly statements will now include helpful information like how long it will take to pay off if I only make the minimum payment
  2. Anything over the minimum payment will be applied toward my highest interest balances which might save me money on interest charges. (Emphasis mine)
  3. I would now have an optional overlimit authorization where I could decide if I wanted the ability to go over my credit limit for a fee.

The telling bit at the end of this amazing list: “Further information about the upcoming changes will be communicated to you once final regulations are issued.”

Regulations.

Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.

Oh and there was something about an interest rate change taking place on December 13 that I might want to read about on a separate page, but only if I really felt like it. It’s not that big a deal. It’s just a minor adjustment.

Ok, that’s not fair. They did put it in big bold letters at the beginning of the letter, but how can I slam evil capitalists if they’re actually trying to communicate with me. In this case, however, I don’t need them to try and slip something past me; what they’re advertising is bad enough.

So I flip over to the next page to find out that my interest rate will be going up. Way up. To 22.49%, a 30% increase. I get nervous thinking that perhaps I missed a payment or they found out I thought the bank bailouts were unconstitutional and a bad idea.

So I called and spoke with a friendly-sounding person with a vaguely Eastern European accent. I told her about the letter and asked if that was correct information. She said yes. I asked if I had done anything to warrant my interest rate going up.

She laughed nervously and said, “No sir, this is a business decision that has been made by HSBC and is being applied to all customers.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, sir, I’m very sorry about that.”

“You’re raising everybody’s interest rate above 20%?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it doesn’t matter that I’ve been a good customer for 18 years?”

“Unfortunately, no, sir. I’m sorry about that.”

“And is there anyone I can talk to that can authorize a lower rate for me?”

“No sir, but you can opt out of the change.”

“And not have use of the card anymore…”

“Right. Again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

I told her I understood that it wasn’t her decision or her fault, but that it was one of the most monumentally stupid business decisions I’d ever heard of.

Now my first reaction is to cancel my card, but that would be a mistake. In the murky world of credit scores, a long relationship is a very good thing. This is one of my oldest cards, so canceling it has the potential to drop my credit score by as much as 100 points according to some advisors. Not the best choice.

Instead, I will simply pay off the card, take it out of my wallet, and file it away. I might make one or two purchases on it a year just to keep some activity on the account, but they will be small and paid off before interest is due. To HSBC, that scenario is apparently preferable than me carrying a balance at a lower interest rate.

So the new math, according to these wunderkinds, is that 16% of $1,000 is worse than 23% of $0. These are the geniuses that Congress has decided are too big to fail and, thus, deserve not only the money I give them as a customer, but some of my tax payments as well.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go into politics…

Filed in Inside My Head, Rants 'n Raves, The Sharpest Tacks, What Does It REALLY Cost? | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Pirillo: Can a company take social networking too far?

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

I follow Chris Pirillo on Twitter and a recent entry of his caught my eye:

chrispirillo: Can a Company Take Social Networking too Far? http://bit.ly/1ZScf7 — 12:51pm

The link leads to a post on his blog discussing news that Best Buy may be requiring new sales associate applicants to have at least 250 followers on Twitter. He asked for feedback and I responded in the comments, but made a couple of minor editing and writing mistakes which drives me nuts, so I decided to reproduce a corrected response here.

You’ll want to read his post first for the following to make any sense.

Chris,

The Best Buy Twitter requirement may not be quite as wacky as it seems. In the non-retail world, sales people have long been responsible not only for finding the cold customer, but for bringing a batch of sales leads with them.

To make a fair assessment, I’d have to know more about the specifics of the requirements, though. Is BB wanting these folks to actively use their personal Twitter networks for sales purposes? That carries a high backlash risk and is not likely to last long, especially in the consumer electronics space where high pressure sales tactics often run people off. Is BB simply using Twitter in the same way many companies use a Bachelors degree or “years of experience” requirement: a way to quickly throw out the applications that are simply a waste of time?

It’s impossible to truly know without being part of the internal strategy meetings, but the latter makes sense to me. It would actually be pretty smart for BB to use Twitter as a weed-out mechanism during a period where they are no doubt being flooded with applications, many from people for whom sales is not a primary skill.

While a large following does not guarantee that the applicant will have the networking skills implied for all of the reasons you list, it does make the odds a lot better. I’d wager that the number of people with more than 250 followers who aren’t providing either some content with value or decent networkers is relatively low.

I don’t fully agree with your statement that it’s not the employee’s job to drum up sales. As a Sales Associate (or whatever BB is calling them these days), that’s more or less exactly their job, though we’ve come to expect much much less from most BB folks on the floor. Granted, as a major retailer BB has potentially better channels in which to work, but who’s to say that augmenting traditional sales and marketing efforts by shifting the company’s Social Media efforts down to the people who actually “get it” isn’t a really interesting approach?

Ultimately, the market will decide if it’s a good idea or not, but, depending on the true rationale behind the requirement (assuming it exists), this is exactly the type of corporate experiment that ends up being a Harvard Business Review case study.

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The Outside of The Asylum

Thursday, May 14, 2009

In his grossly inaccurately named five-volume Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Douglas Adams came up with an ingenious character named Wonko the Sane. Wonko called himself that because he had determined that he was the only sane person on earth.

After coming to this conclusion, Wonko decided that the rest of the world belonged in an asylum, so he built a house to contain the entire world. He built his house inside-out. The inside of the house looked like the outside, while the outside of the house consisted of painted walls, furniture, etc. In this way, by going “into” the house, Wonko and his wife (”Arcane Jill”) could live on “the outside of the asylum.”

So how, you might ask, did Wonko determine that the rest of the world was insane? Well, one day he was unwrapping a toothpick and noticed that the wrapper had printed instructions on how to properly use it. He decided that any society that needed instructions on how to use a toothpick was certifiably insane and should be committed to an asylum.

It is with tremendous amusement and not insignificant trepidation, therefore, that I present you with a link to an article (complete with demonstration video, no less!) found this week on no less august a publication than the Wall Street Journal.

How to wash your hands.

Even disregarding the last five months of fantasyland economics and nationalization, this article proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world has finally gone completely and irrevocably insane.

If you need me, I’ll be at Home Depot getting some building supplies. Heck, I’ll even be contributing to an increase in New Home Construction.

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