Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Saturday, February 24, 2007 Company Meetings  I hate company meetings. I understand that sometimes they are necessary evils and on occasion they are useful, but generally I've found them to be a waste of time. That was my feeling when I worked at one of the largest companies in the world and today, working for a small company, I am just a contemptuous towards meetings. It's not that I have disrespect for my colleagues or my superiors. One problem is that I have a short attention span and if I don’t feel a vibe within five minutes into the meeting, my mind starts to wonder. One time I was berated by my boss at that large company for doodling during a meeting. I told him that it actually helped me concentrate. When he pushed, I stopped the Picasso artwork and transferred the work to my mind. My thoughts drifted to a programming project I was working on with occasional excursions to food, women, work out, and even old Star Trek episodes. I've had some good meetings too where I was laser focused. Those were generally held with my counterparts like programmers, system admins, and network engineers. You know, the types of people that I can actually learn something from and there's an educational and productive discourse. This is not to say that I don’t feel guilty about my attitude. I have often viewed other people in meetings with envy and wonder. How could they possibly hold their focus during these boring meetings? But then along the way something wonderful happened that finally helped to relieve my guilt, at least partially. It was a validation of sorts to observe that most people in meetings weren't as focused as they appeared to be. The next time you're in your company's meeting take a look around at the participants. You will hear mouse clicks and keyboard taps on open laptops and slumped heads focused on Blackberries and Treos conveniently hidden under the mahogany table being frantically scrolled and thumbed, a phenomenon known as "chipmunking". Yeah sure, these guys are really paying attention. Even the argument that they're working during the meeting (multi-tasking) is a weak one at best. Why bother to come to a meeting, when there's urgent work to be done? Wouldn’t they be more productive at their desks where they don't have to fake interest in the topic being discussed? Certainly I am not the only one complaining about this. Here's an article in a recent issue of CIO magazine I stumbled upon bemoaning the same issue. Then again, I'm not really complaining. In fact, I am hoping that recognizing the dubious value of frequent meetings, companies cut back on the frivolous gatherings, leaving only the necessary and productive ones. It would also help if aviation rules of take-off were fully enforced, requiring all participants to leave their devices in the off position during the meeting. meetings,blackberry,palm,treo,laptops,notebooks Labels: business, computers <Company Meetings> // posted by rh 1 comments | Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Tax Break Myth  Republicans like to pride themselves in supporting lower taxes. That is indeed a great ideal. The problem is that today such a view is plain false. I'm a middle class citizen, and I can speak with authority that the tax breaks have meant very little in terms of helping me achieve fiscal success. In fact, adjusted for my age, I am poorer today than when Clinton was in the White House. Don’t believe me? Let's take an inventory: - It is true that lower federal taxes put a bit more money in my pocket, but at what cost? When the government takes in less tax money, it can do one of two things to adjust: cut programs or borrow more. The US government has done both and the result has been fewer services and more debt. Is that worth the few dollars I get to pocket every year? Not. When services are cut, I have to pay (out of pocket) for those no longer available (roads, schools, police, etc.) And those Treasury holders will need to get paid at some point too. The bond Ponzi scheme can only go so far, and guess who'll be making the payments. - Have you looked at your energy bills lately? Bet you're paying a lot more than you used to. More for electricity, for gasoline, for heating oil or gas. That's money leaving your pocket while the oil companies get richer. - Sure, your home might be worth more, but who can be happy with the higher property taxes. And to add more pain, those lofty prices encouraged so many to tap their home equity. It was fun while it lasted, but now that home prices are falling and interest rates are rising, little chance those property taxes will get rolled back, and it's payback time for those HELOC and interest-only deals. - Every year people pay more for medical insurance and get shrinking benefits. And that's for the lucky ones who actually have medical insurance. Some 50 million Americans don’t even have medical insurance and that number keeps growing. - If you haven't heard of AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), you will soon. It's basically the government's way of making sure they get a certain amount of tax money from each person, no matter what. AMT is snaring more people every year and it's one of the greatest government money scams going. Sure, we give you tax breaks, but oops, sorry, you don’t qualify. The above list is far from comprehensive, but by itself is enough for an average person to realize that the measly tax breaks are the proverbial smoke and mirror and have done nothing for the middle class except to squeeze them more year over year. The tax relief agenda is nothing more than a platform for political posturing and maneuvering to swindle the citizens for their votes. So let me implore the government to raise my taxes, but give me services and better medical coverage, lower my property taxes and energy costs, and abolish AMT. But that means helping the middle class. Never mind then. middle class,republicans,tax,amt,property tax,insurance,gas prices Labels: business-finance, tax <Tax Break Myth> // posted by rh 0 comments | Tuesday, February 13, 2007 The Alternate Chat Room  On September 4th 2006 the world lost a famed and intrepid animal lover, Steve Irwin. Soon after, the Internet was abuzz with the news of his tragic death. Checking the news on the next day, during my lunch hour, I scanned some of the stories surrounding the circumstances of his death and this is one of the pages on MSNBC I stumbled on covering the story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14663786. I then proceeded to read some of the comments left by the viewers. As expected, most contained messages from bereft fans. There were also a number of messages from readers commenting on his carelessness with animals or the fact that he got what he deserved as well as a number of irrelevant messages from jokesters. I thought that everyone was entitled to their opinion and I moved on. A couple of months later, as the year was about to turn over, I happened to revisit the same story linked from a page on MSNBC touting the most popular stories of 2006 and I was astounded by the number of comments left on that page. As I recall, some 70,000 entries had been logged by the end of 2006. I was in disbelief over the sheer number of readers that had left comments on that page and I decided to read some of the latter ones. As I read some of the comments a feeling of confusion set in. The messages had no relevance to Steve Irwin or his legacy. They weren't even about animals or nature. They seemed like random ramblings posted by a few readers, but as I read a few more a pattern started to emerge. The message board was actually being used by individuals to pass messages to each other. Real time conversations were taking place as I was scanning the board. Topics ranged from dinner preparations, to old friends, to buying a new car with a number of people typing one-liners back and forth. This board was no longer a comments section about Steve Irwin but it had morphed into a private chat room for a few people engaged in private conversations, a substitute for a chat room or Instant Messaging, if you will. Only the messages weren't so private as they were out there for the world to read. As of this writing that board has logged over 100,000 messages. New posts continue to pour in and I'm willing to bet that majority of them have nothing to do with the famous crocodile hunter. Apparently the admins at MSNBC have no problem with this. Comments are most likely scanned by a program to weed out obvious profanity and people are left to their own devices to manage the board. That level of freedom coupled with endless computing resources (storage and bandwidth) at MSNBC opened the door to an alternate usage of the board many took advantage of quickly and in force. This just goes to show how unpredictable and ingenious the online community really can be. Many forum and chat sites would dream of having the level of traffic and interaction that this one obscure board has attained and surely there are many more boards of this type living in the shadows, unnoticed by the casual browser or even the site administrators. The fact that such usage is improper is besides the point. What is notable is the level of people's inventiveness to bend and tailor a simple and trivial product into a makeshift, yet effective, tool for communication. There's a business lesson in there waiting to be discovered. chat rooms,instant messaging,im,steve irwin,crocodile hunter,msnbc Labels: web <The Alternate Chat Room> // posted by rh 1 comments | Sunday, February 04, 2007 HTML Forms, Part 3  Click here to read Part 2 The following is a simple example of an HTML form: <form method="post" action="page.php"> Name: <input type="text" name="Name"><br> City: <input type="text" name="City"><br> <input type="submit" value="Submit"> </form> This basic segment is placed inside an HTML page and when users browse to that page, they generally see something like this: Name: City: The user is expected to fill in values for the Name and City and submit the form. Upon submission, the data is encoded, posted back to the server and routed to 'page.php' for handling. The general transmission is something like the following: POST /page.php HTTP/1.1 Host: www.website.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Content-Length: 27 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Name=John+Doe&City=New+York The first paragraph is the header describing the size and MIME type of the data among other information. The second paragraph contains the submitted data in an encrypted format with the fields delimited with '&'. The handling page, 'page.php', would generally contain a script to digest the data and take some kind of an action, such as validating the data, saving them to a database, or look up and display related information based on the submitted data. This, of course, is a simple form, but all HTML forms behave the same way at their cores. Debugging forms is a relatively straight-forward task these days. The simplest step is to have the receiving page just print out the submitted values back to make sure that the page is correctly receiving the submitted data. Sometimes, however, it might be helpful to inspect the POST data in raw format. In those cases, scripts can be written to receive the data and display them without any processing. There are also utilities available online that can be used to achieve the same task with ease. This site also has one such tool available that users can utilize to view their form POST data in raw format. To use this tool, the 'action' parameter of the form is set to the page's URL.Tthe form is then populated and submitted and the page. Upon submission, the POST data is displayed to the user. Visit Form Post Tester/Viewer for more information on this tool. html,html forms,post,web servers,http headers,headers,http Labels: headers, html, html forms, http, http headers, post, web servers <HTML Forms, Part 3> // posted by rh 0 comments |

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