Over the past few years, I’ve discovered (well, 9/10 people have probably discovered this) that a little screen reorganization helps refresh your head.

I find that if I just work, work, work, and let the coffee stains, the papers, and crap pile up on my desk – I get overwhelmed.  I feel like I’m in a cave.

It’s so easy, yet some of us let it pile up for weeks.  Every once a while, do yourself a favor and take a 15 minute break to declutter your desk.  Re-organize your screen(s) – it’s funny how tilting and positioning your screens in a new way refreshes your day.

What do you do to stay refreshed?

Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a startup called Rentabilities.  We help rental stores (e.g. people who rent tents, table, chairs) take reservations online.

Throughout the years, I’ve run into hundreds of people, and over the years each person has somehow shaped where I stand today.

Here’s an overly general classification of the types of people you run into:

• People who want to help and have real experience (past entrepreneurs)
  This group gives you specific, experience related advice.
• People who don’t quite understand what we’re doing but give us advice anyways (your Grandma)
  This group is one of the most helpful.  They see things from a life perspective, and often have amazing things to say.
• The Naysayers

The Naysayer

You spend day and night thinking about your big idea.  You take notes, you talk to everyone you know, and you work extremely hard on your idea and your company’s direction.

You get to some conference, some business plan competition, or some setting where there are people who are more “experienced” and more educated than you on your company… and you run into the Naysayer.

You know the type: you’re smack in the middle of your pitch, the pitch that you’ve worked on for hundreds of hours, and right in the middle some guy interrupts you and says:

“Well what if someone breaks their arm on a jumpy castle?”

They think they’ve got you.  They think they’re so damn smart – they’ve found the loophole that negates your entire company!  I’m not talking about people who find quality questions to ask – I’m talking about the kind of person, who, no matter what you say will not let you speak…will not back down.  Naysayers talk at you, not with you. They ask you questions they know you cannot possibly answer in 15 seconds, and while you are giving them an answer they ask you another question to try and stump you.  They basically want you to get down on your hands and knees and pray to them.

I can’t stand these assholes, honestly – I know you’ve experienced it too, and it’s about time that someone (me) gets it out there.  Naysayers want to feel smart, they want to feel special, and they think they know everything.

Naysayers tell you you’re wrong, and you don’t know your own product or your own product. Naysayers suck, and I’m done being around them and listening to their horse shit.

Only You Know

The truth is – no one knows your market, your customers, and your product better than you.  No one but you can decide the path to take.  You’ve been through the trials, you’ve tested different models, you’ve built the damn company from the ground up, and no one with 30 seconds of “listening” can come in and think they know everything there is to know.

There’s Always a Solution

No matter the problem, there is always an elequent, simple, and easy solution to the problem.  There is always an answer.

What to Do

My strategy with naysayers (when they are getting out of hand and won’t let you speak) is this:

“You know what, Bill, I appreciate what you have to say, but recently I’ve decided to not let anything anyone says bring me down.  Sure, there are problems, but the bottom line is I’m not going to let one minor detail bring my entire company, vision, and years of hard work down.  So if you have anything positive to say, and you want to give me a few minutes to talk with you, then we’ll keep talking.  Otherwise, I just don’t have time for this”

What’s your Strategy?

Am I the only one that runs into  seemingly hundreds of Naysayers?  How do you combat endless negativity, and those who just want to bring you down? What’s your strategy?

The Short Version

• Sovereign Bank has a system called eStatements – a PDF delivery system of your statements
• I shredded & recycled my mail statements – they’re messy, contain marketing materials, and a pain to store
• At the end of each year, I would re-print my statments on 8.5×11 paper – neatly organized and no marketing materials…
• I did this for 3 years – depended on the eStatements PDF files
• In November 2009, Sovereign was bought by Santander
• They “sent an email” notifying customers to download their statements January-November 2009 – I never got the email
• I login in March, to find that 9 mos. of statements are missing
• Sovereign refuses to level with me, trying to force me to pay $109 in statement reprint fees

The Full Version

Recently (March 2010) I had a debacle with Sovereign Bank (Santander as of Nov 2009).  When I signed up for two business checking accounts, I found out Sovereign had a thing called “eStatements” – your bank statements delivered as PDF files.  Pretty awesome, huh!?  I started shredding my paper statements, and depending on the eStatements system… it was great.  At the end of each tax year, I would print the full year’s statements – that way they were neatly organized (no folds, or marketing materials) in my file cabinet.

I used eStatments for the past 3 years – every year I shredded (and recycled) my paper statements and re-printed them as 1-page statements.  It was much easier to keep track of this way.

Recently Sovereign bank was bought by Santander.  They decided they needed to move the eStatements system to a “new” system.  They sent out an email message, through eStatements.  Guess what?  Never got it. Apparently, was supposed to download and save my statements for January 2009 to November 2009 – all of those statements would be wiped from my account.

February rolls around, and I go to login to my eStatements account – no statements!  This must be a mistake… so I call up Sovereign Bank and ask them where my statements are.  ”Mr. Cook, you received an email, you were supposed to download and save your statements.  I can order the statements for you, but it’s $6 per statement per account for 9 months.”

To save you from the details, I spent 20 minutes trying to tell the operator that this is unfair, and that I never recieved the email.  She started lecturing me saying that I should have kept my statements… and I tell her that I use this eStatement system because of the convienence it brings – and just because I missed one email from them I shouldn’t have to pay $108 in bank taxes.  In the end, she said there was nothing she could do for me, and I asked her, “So you want to lose me as a customer over a mistake you made, and over $108?  Alright then!”

The bottom line is this is not my fault.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think I’m wrong on this one… an email notification for such an important thing isn’t good enough.  Plus, they’re just too cheap to migrate the statements!

The Realities of Free Checking

Free checking is not free.  Because banks give it to you for free, they have had to create fees to make up for their revenue loss.  Overdraft on a $2 coffee?  That’ll be $35.  Need a statement? That’ll be $6.  Want a lollipop?  That’ll be $1.  Seriously… this is getting out of hand!  What banking-fee-horror-story do you have?

This Has Been Going on For Years

I’ve had issue after issue with Sovereign!

• Charged $10 a month for free checking… Sovereign bought my local bank and didn’t migrate my account correctly.  Every month for 3 years I had to go down and get them to refund $10.
• Charged $10 every time I use debit – this is another result of a bad migration… every time I use debit I am charged $10
• “Foreign ATM fee” – every time I use an ATM that is not Sovereign’s, I am charged that bank’s fee (usually $1-4), then I’m charged $10 by Sovereign
• Overdraft fees on my personal account – one time a merchant, who charged me on the 4th of the month for 6 months, charged me on November 4th, then turned around and charged me again on the 10th.  I was balancing my checking account, but the merchant double charged me.  I was charged $210 in overdraft fees, and Sovereign wouldn’t side with me!  I had to call the merchant (https://www.mahealthconnector.org) and fight with them for literally 15 hours to get them to refund me and charge me on the correct date.  That’s another story!!!

Who will be My New Bank?

I’m ready to move to a new bank.  Even if I have to pay $10 a month for an account (my Sovereign accounts are “free” checking accounts) – that’s fine with me.  I want to be treated with respect and have a bank that holds itself accountable.  My requirements are:

• A bank that has decent hours.
• A bank with a nice, easy to use online system – iPhone apps are a plus.
• Ability for Quickbooks to sync (sometimes called Business Online Banking) – required
• Reasonable monthly fee.
• I’m currently South of Boston.

If you have any suggestions, leave a comment!

• Blank build path windows (when right clicking on a project’s properties) – having to manage the project files manually
• Weird generated asset errors

I think getting setup with Flex and eclipse requires an unnecessary amount of knowledge… hopefully this simplifies it.

I finally decided to find a solution – here it is:

1. Don’t install Flex Builder – install the eclipse plugin
2. Get eclipse 3.4
   • http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
   • Scroll down to eclipse Classic
   • Click on “other downloads”
   • Or just go to http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/
   • Download version 3.4, unzip it, and drop it in C:\Program Files (x86)\eclipse
3. Get the Flex Builder Plugin for Eclipse – http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flexbuilder3
4. When installing, make sure you choose the Eclipse folder (second step): C:\Program Files (x86)\eclipse
   
5. When you’re done, open up eclipse.exe, and then go to Window->Open Perspective, then choose Flex.

Conclusion

I hope Flash Builder 4 solves the 64-bit issues… this install is a pain in the ass!  Plus, too bad there’s not a 64-bit version of Flex Builder…

I needed a way to secure a single page. This could be an order page or a page where I want to protect user information. The problem is, even if you simply try to go to “https://mysite.com/page”, you’ll be re-directed to the http page by WordPress. Furthermore, even if you use htaccess to force the content over https, you’ll still get “partially encrypted” errors.

What is out there

There was Admin SSL, which has a 4-star rating… but did not work for me; I think the developer stopped working on it and newer versions of WP don’t work with the plugin. I also tried HTTPS for WordPress, and that didn’t work either.

Because I couldn’t find anything… I put together this hack. I guess I could make it into a plugin, but I’m lazy.

How to do it

Required knowledge/tools:

• Installation of CURL on your server
• Basic knowledge of .htaccess, and how to edit the file
• Basic php knowledge
• A working SSL certificate

1. Modify your .htaccess file

Figure out what page you wan to secure. For example, you might want to secure /contact-us. Add the following lines to your .htacccess file, before the normal wordpress lines:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^contact-us/ /secure-page.php [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^contact-us /secure-page.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
# normal WordPress stuff:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Here we’re checking to see if the visitor is requesting the “contact-us” page, and if so, we’re rewriting the request to a file called secure-page.php, instead of loading WordPress (step 2).

2. Rename /contact-us & modify menu

Next, you’ll need to get rid of the old /contact-us page you had, and rename it to contact-page-content – you can do this using WordPress… edit the Premalink, and set it to /contact-page-content.

You’ll need to exclude the page from your navigation, and then put an absolute link to /contact-us in your menu. I suggest the “Exclude Pages” plugin, found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/

2. Create secure-page.php

Create a file called secure-page.php and add it to your base directory (in the same location as your .htaccess file):

$domain = "www.mydomain.com";
if (  $_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'on' )
{
$url="https://$domain".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header("Location:$url");
exit;
}
$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,"http://$domain/contact-page-content"); // assuming pretty urls are setup this way...
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer))
{
print "Timed Out";
}
else
{
$buffer = str_replace("src=\"http://$domain", 'src="', $buffer);
$buffer = str_replace("src='$domain", "src='", $buffer);
$buffer = str_replace("url(\"http://$domain", 'url("', $buffer);
$buffer = preg_replace ("/http:\/\/.*?(\/.*?\.css)/", "$1", $buffer);
$buffer = preg_replace ("/http:\/\/.*?(\/.*?\.js)/", "$1", $buffer);
$buffer = preg_replace ("/http:\/\/.*?(\/.*?\.xml)/", "$1", $buffer);
print $buffer;
}

OK, here’s an explanation:

You renamed /contact-us to /contact-page-content, and then excluded it from your navigation.  Note that the page still exists – you can enter /contact-page-content into your browser, and it will show the page, right?  But, you hid it from navigation, and you provided the user with a link to /contact-us.  Some people might say this solution is still not “secure”, but I could honestly care less if the user can still go to /contact-page-content… if they do, who cares?

As for what secure-page.php is doing:

The first part checks to make sure the page is served over https. If not, it forwards to the https version, and exits.

Next, we use CURL to request another page (contact-page-content).  Remember that you can still navigate to /contact-page-content, and CURL is doing just that. CURL then downloads the entire content of the page into a buffer/string.

Next, we replace all references to http assets to https… or just “/”. We do this because WordPress uses absolute URLs to assets (”http://mysite.com/image.jpg”), and we want it to be relative (”/image.jpg”).  We then echo out the buffer, and voila, your page is now secured.

Conclusion

I should turn this into a plugin, but I’m lazy and I just don’t have the time…

If you have problems just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you!

In 2006 I started a company called Rentabilities, which helps party rental companies rent their products online.  We needed an SSL certificate to process credit card payments.  I looked around at different SSL options, and ultimately I chose Verisign since I wanted to get the best for my clients.

You should never have to wait in line to pay

My first experience with Verisign was with their billing department in April 2007.  Apparently they’re such a large organization that they do NOT accept payment prior to installing the SSL certificate.  You have to supply them with a PO number, and then they bill you afterwards.  That’s fine – but why?  I was ready to pay, and I didn’t want to have to deal with another step.  Regardless, I went along with it.

April 2008: You should never have to wait in line to pay: again

One year goes by, and it’s time to renew my SSL certificate.  Guess what?  They still haven’t solved their payment issues: another PO, another pain in the ass.  I get a bill from them about a month after installing the SSL and pay it immediately.

April 2009: … I waited in line again.  I don’t think they’re going to fix the billing issue.

One year goes by, and it’s time to renew my SSL certificate.  Guess what?  They still haven’t solved their payment issues: another PO, another pain in the ass.  This time, however, my sales rep took my American Express from me (as well as a PO number, for some reason).  I figured I was all set.  I was wrong…

August 2009:  A letter Credit Management Association?  Who is this?

Let me just say that I’m great at paying my bills.  I can’t stand when my customers withhold payments.  I pay my employees on time, and I pay all of my bills on time.  So when I got a letter from the “Credit Management Assocation”, I thought maybe it was for some kind of credit card offer.

I open it up, and to my dismay, I read the following:

Claim #: 162190
Balance: $995

Your immediate action is required.

Your account is seriously past due and has been placed…

WTF?

I quickly remember that I gave Verisign my amex months ago.  I never got an email or a phone call from them.  This must be a mistake.

Looking through my bank statements, it turns out that Verisign never did charge my card.  Strange.

Let’s use a collection agency: we can’t make a 4 minute phone call…

I never got any emails.  I never got any phone calls – nothing.  So I send an email to Verisign – no response after 5 days.  I send ANOTHER email to Verisign – no response after another 7 days.  Apparently Versign likes to ignore their customers.

I really want to get in touch with Versigin.  So after no response from their billing department, I emailed my sales rep and told him the story.  He calls me back right away.  Apparently Verisign only cares about support – because this guy is the only competant one working at the company (well, the only competant one I’ve delt with).

We emailed you – we emailed you

About an hour later I get a call from the billing department.  I politely tell the representative my story (really, I didn’t get upset at all), and I proceed to suggest to her that a phone call would have sufficed, and a collection agency was really unnecessary.  She then goes on to say that she emailed me, twice.  I have gmail – I check my email religously – I never got an email.  I searched my email – nothing.

Even after I suggest the phone call route to her, she still continues to make excuses.  No apologies – nothing.  No sypathy for the situation they’ve put me in – nothing.

Never ever again

I’ll never do business with Verisign again.  I’m baffled that they wouldn’t take 4 mintues to call me after my card didn’t go through.

I know of two ways to cast something from one type to another:

1.  var myvar:Type1 = mything as Type1; // does not work

OR

2.  var myvar:Type1 = Type1 (mything); // works!

I was using the “as” keyword, and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t cast my string to a number.  I finally drilled down, and replaced it with usage #2 above, and it fixed my issue.

So annoying!

http://myworld.ebay.com/djrichclub90

Full story coming after I get the full results.

It’s sweet.  But until Foxmarks (now XMarks) supports Chrome… I’ll never switch.  I use more than one computer… and I need my bookmarks to sync.  I also like to sync my passwords.

XMarks – please support Google Chrome!

It’s amazing what motivated people can  do.  We put it up online on March 9, and within 4 days:

We’re #1 result in Google for Pi Day Challenge
We’re on 1-2 page for “Pi Day”

We have 800 registered users
We have 2200 unique visitors from 28 countries

Check it out – Take The Challenge!!! www.pidaychallenge.com