If I were PayPal, I’d slap you too

PayPal shuts down the accounts of perfectly legitimate websites every day. Sometimes they just hold the funds (for six months!) of vendors they suspect of fraud, even many with perfect records and zero customer complaints. Why? Because what else are they going to do? But also, because it’s hard to be PayPal.

Full disclosure: I own a 13-year-old company that has used PayPal since 2001 and use them thousands of times per month. My company has never had a beef with PayPal, but I feel acutely for those who have been wronged. PayPal is not technically a monopoly but they’re the most trusted name in online payment. Lose your account with them and you may well lose your online business. Me personally? I love PayPal and have literally never had a problem with them in something close to a million transactions.

But back to the slap. What should PayPal do when their fraud heuristics give the ol’ Spidey sense a tingle? Remember, thousands of PayPal accounts get opened every day, many of them bad guys working under new names.

Let’s try a thought experiment and imagine how you’d handle certain situations if you were PayPal. What if someone opened up a new account,  published a PDF file (or “digital information product”) that cost $39.95, sold a ton of them, then withdrew all the money as it came in and refused to honor refund requests. Not nearly as strange as it seems. This sort of thing happens all the time with people like Seth Godin who have big lists of followers. So imagine a Seth Godin type who publishes his first book and sells a jillion.

Change the circumstances a little. What if the product turned out to be plagiarized or just atrocious and didn’t follow through on any of the promises made in its sales copy?

What if you were PayPal and that happened again? And again and again and again? What if you consistently ended up on the hook to the credit card companies because you allowed this kind of fraud to continue?

You’d probably start at least making users wait a while before they withdrew money. Now what if that didn’t stop the fraud? What if you found that the only way to stop a good chunk of fraud was to lose business deliberately by employing the brute force technique of freezing or closing out the accounts of anyone who had the same profile as a ripoff artist?

Yes, you’d be throwing away business. But you’re PayPal, and you answer to Wall Street. At some point it becomes more prudent to be aggressive about “precrime” so you don’t lose your existing customers.

If I were publicly held like PayPal (more precisely, like its parent company eBay) , I’d probably slap those businesses too. It is the only way I could think of to manage fraud on a large scale without plunging an otherwise healthy PayPal into vats of red ink.

This is not to say PayPal doesn’t just do idiotic things, like deep-sixing a clearly legitimate charity drive by the good people at Regretsy, who had a longstanding relationship.

I had the exact idea of PayPal before there was a PayPal. I didn’t follow through because I could never figure out a satisfactory way to deal with fraud in a way that would be fair to the good guys. It looks like they never did either. I hate to say it, new guys, but if I were PayPal I’d slap you too.

Or is there another way to handle this seemingly impossible situation? Give me a shout if you think you have the answer.

 

 

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Hire an expert for 20 minutes? I’m in! (Pomodoro hiring)

Normally I try to write about things I know pretty well. This time, I’m rolling the dice. Based on a link from Hacker News I visited the site, apparently an oDesk spinoff by researcher Greg Little (oDesk actually has a researcher?), and fell in love with the idea. The plan will be that you hire an expert for 20 minutes, an idea that seemed to originate in the 1980s.

I have hired a fair number experts in my life, and usually I know well within 20 minutes whether they’re losers. But quite often I’ve had to pony up for the full hour minimum, and left feeling a bit taken advantage of. I look forward to this idea taking off. Would be fantastic to be able to get legal consultation this way.

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No BS Online PHP tutorial in PowerPoint style-free

While searching for something else entirely I stumbled across a no-nonsense PHP tutorial in PowerPoint format but viewable in a web browser. It’s called, natch, PHP Powerpoint — Teach PHP With This. Although it tries to serve the layman it’s probably best if you’re at least a beginning or intermediate programmer who doesn’t happen to know PHP.

Only shortcoming is that it’s 350+ slides and the only way to navigate is using the forward and back buttons. So why use this instead of the free, comprehensive and very, very worthy at, PHP.net, penned largely by Andi Gutmans, PHP’s own creator? Exactly because it’s not comprehensive, not having to cover PHP’s massive standard libraries or the philosophy of object-oriented programming. Perhaps because it’s a free resource, it lays bare the language’s essentials using a well-illustrated, minimum text necessary approach. Just the thing if PHP is about to become your second (or third, or seventh) computer language.

 

 

 

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Domain name registration

I will court controversy by saying that we like GoDaddy (affiliate link, or godaddy.com if you want to copy and paste without it) for domain name registration and use them for approximately 500 domain names. PRO: Your new domain names appear on the web within minutes. They have 24-hour phone service. They’re by far the best domain name registrar to use if you want to sell a domain name to someone else because so many people know how to use them and have accounts. CON: They favor phone support over web-based support so they can upsell services while they have you on the phone. They make it too difficult to buy a domain name with no other products.

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Web hosts

We use HostGator (affiliate link, or hostgator.com without the affiliate link) for dozens of sites. They’ve hit the sweet spot in web hosting, with fantastic 24-hour service, a massive feature set (namely unlimited domains and unlimited databases, which means you can set up as many WordPress sites as you want), and good performance–all for under $10/month. HOT TIP: Use coupon code HOSTGATOR to get your first month of  HostGator for a penny.

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Who Are the Other Dennis Ritchies?

Dennis Ritchie, supremely literate codeveloper of the C programming language and its accompanying little book, “The C Programming” language, died as a titan in the programming world and as a footnote–if that–elsewhere. (My favorite tribute to him: This first-rate sonnet by Edmund Jorgenson. It’s as good as you’ll find in any poetry journal.)

Ritchie was titanically gifted. He had a deep understanding of how computers work and utterly changed the way generations of programmers worked. Before he and Brian Kernighan invented C, each computer had a completely different programming language. It was sort of like having to learn English to work in New Hampshire, French to work in Vermont, and Spanish to work in California.

C was designed to so that one could isolate most of the computer-specific parts into a subset of the program. It was also aesthetically pleasing, irresistibly so to forward-thinking programmers.

C was such a powerful influence that programmers demanded it even when manufacturers and companies like Microsoft (sorry, my cherished alma mater) actively fought against its use. While its use is waning in most programming jobs it is still very much alive, running in the operating system of virtually every desktop or laptop computer on Earth, and on billions of other devices that have computers embedded in them. Dennis Ritchie’s influence on humanity was infinitely greater than that of, say, Princess Diana, and maybe even of Michael Jackson.

In my opinion he should have been a Nobel or Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. This is a hard thing to explain to people who aren’t programmers, so I never expected anything like that to happen.  Understandably, most mentions of his name outside of Reddit or Hacker News were polite but muted. Because his accomplishments were of such a technical nature one doesn’t expect him to be on the Medal of Freedom shortlist.

I am haunted now, wondering who the Dennis Ritchies of the rest of the world are. Maybe Paul Erdos in math? Surely one of them is Malcom McLean, who invented the shipping container. Another one would have to be Norman Borlaug, directly responsible for saving the lives of billions of people through improved farming techniques. Who are the living ones? Who’s the Dennis Ritchie of hip-hop, or country music, or materials science, or construction, or art? There’s so much I don’t know….

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Starbucks Kick You Out? Good. You Need It.

Recently an unconfirmed story has been going around that Starbucks is starting to eject people who hang around for hours, using it as an office and seldom making any purchases. (The blog post that triggered the story has, interestingly, vanished). I’ve contacted Starbucks and am awaiting a reply. Meanwhile, let’s pretend it’s true. Because if you’re one of those freeloaders, it may be the best improvement to your productivity since you gave up Facebook for a couple of hours just to see what it would be like.

No Pain Deadline, No Gain

It’s easy to forget that deadlines make us more productive. Study after study has shown that people tend to be more efficient when they’re given a deadline, even if it’s not strictly necessary. What are you doing for 3 hours in a Starbucks, anyway?

There’s almost no task you can be doing that requires 3 hours in a Starbucks.  If you’re writing a long report, it would be much better to find a quieter location. But are you really writing big-ass reports all the time?

If, on the other hand, you’re dawdling your way through emails, tweets, and Facebook updates, ask yourself whether those are necessary to your job. If they are, I strongly suggest you give yourself a 45 minute window to get them done and blow out of there. Do them sequentially. Turn off your phone to get these tasks done without interruption.

Kick Yourself Out of Starbucks

Doing serious business development or just about any other kind of white-collar work that you think you need Starbucks for demands your full attention. It’s noisy in most Starbucks locations. Besides, they’re paying rent by the square foot. Do you honestly think they owe you an office?

What part of your job brings home the bacon? It’s probably things that you can do better someplace else. If it’s cold calls, then you’re bugging the other customers. If it’s calls to clients, then the background noise is annoying them. If it’s programming or web development, the distractions are probably harming, not helping, your billable efforts. If you’re interested in doing high quality work, consider doing an hour or so at Starbucks and have the courtesy to kick yourself out. Do the rest in your home office or library, or wherever you can focus like a laser.

Give yourself a deadline. Stop being a slacker. Watch your productivity skyrocket.

Posted in Work Habits & Productivity | 2 Comments

News of the World Shutting Down-We’re Here to Help

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tom Campbell
EasyOnMe, Inc.
12819 SE 38th St. PMB 293
Bellevue, WA 98006
Office: (425) 223-3279
Fax: (623) 321-6087
eom@easyonme.com

News of the World Shutting Down: Scandal-Generating Robot Runs New Site With 100% Truth-Free Drop-In Replacement

After Illustrious 168-Hour Beta Test Period, BreakingNewsOfTheWorld.com Fills Shoes of Historic Publication: No Phones Tapped

Bellevue, WA, For Immediate Release - ”News of the World Shutting Down” headlines have dominated every media site on the planet for days, while a hardworking robot has quietly provided a free, scandal-generating replacement service at http://www.breakingnewsoftheworld.com. In its historic 168-hour run the new publication has already broken News of the World’s impressive one-day record for inaccurate stories–fulfilling its stated mission of providing 100% falsehoods round the clock, without a single wiretap law broken.

News of the World Closing Provides New Opportunities

Asks Breaking News of the World publisher Tom Campbell: “The News of the World phone hacking scandal hammered home an urgent journalistic question: in time of declining circulation, rocketing print costs, and burgeoning numbers of B- and C-level celebrities desperate for media coverage, how can a legitimate news operation survive?”

Breaking News of the World disregards the question altogether by promising to provide absolutely zero legitimate news, instead using trailing-edge software to scandalous stories on the fly with 100% inaccuracy. The kind of computing power required to create compelling fake journalism of this quality has only been available since the 1970s, and for obvious reasons has seldom been employed with such potency on the Web.

News of the World Shutting Down Results in Launch of New Publication

“It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of yellow journalism”, points out ex-Microsoft manager Campbell. “Just click the Next and Previous Scandal buttons and you’ll get an endless flow of despicable rubbish, but at least it’s unique every time. I think.” The Breaking New of the World Site features:

* Targeted fake stories created for each individual reader, with no two experiences ever the same
* Instant headline and story generation
* Guaranteed useless stories about has-been actors, washed-up rockers, and aging football stars
* A minuscule, never-changing, utterly irrelevant rights-cleared selection of vaguely familiar-looking stock photographs

Robotic Staff of 1 Does Work of 200

Before the News of the World phone hacking scandal, that publication had already slimmed its once-bloated workforce down to a modest 200 after cost-cutting measures. At its inevitable closing Breaking News of the World will only need to make one staff member redundant, a robot named Rovatron. Rovatron still holds down a day job at online auction sniping firm http://www.esnipe.com [eSnipe, Inc.], but its enormous processing power is hardly taxed by its additional duties. “We wanted to help England in its darkest of hours,” said an eSnipe spokesman. “eSnipe are only too happy to export rubbish journalism creation technology at no cost to our friends across the pond.”

Rovatron’s defense department origins are belied by its artificially idiotic retrofit software. Able to generate over 190,002 fraudulent stories per second, it divvies them out to the http://www.breakingnewsoftheworld.com site with astounding speed. “Eat your heart out, Murdochs,” says publisher Campbell. “No one is happy about the News of the World shutting down,” he says with Murdoch-like empathy, “but truly loathsome journalism must now be created by upstarts, and we simply can’t outsource this kind of work to non English-speaking countries.”

# # #

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Independence Day 2011

Two hundred thirty-five years ago the greatest set of  minds in history got together in a smoky, furnace-hot pub, dense with the funk of agitated people, fierce arguments between gentlemen who were not above solving a problem with sidearms, and the insurmountable question of slavery among a people declared to be free.

They were, of course, in mortal danger. The document being presented to them, a declaration of independence, was tantamount to kicking the king’s ass, then running like hell to get away. People like Ben Franklin and George Washington had until recently thought of themselves as loyal citizens of Britain. Now they were inviting the mightiest naval force in the West for duel (at least they had home advantage).

There was some possibility nothing would happen. Benign neglect is perhaps the most effective form of government and it worked out fine with us and the Brits, until they started charging for protections we received from them. But nobody knew if Cornwallis would charge in here immediately, wait for a war to be declared, or what.

Reading the notes of these meetings one realizes they were adamant that they get the whole thing right. Many of them were architects, which shows in the elegance of the system they created.  Many were scientists, which shows in the way they applied experience and human nature to their founding document. Many more hated each other because, well, that’s what happens when you’re doing something this important and you don’t agree completely with your neighbor.

Their army would be led by a man whose military past to this point was mainly marked by inexperience and catching-up. There were mostly no uniforms. But the army would not yet be raised by July 4, 1776. What would be raised was a flag. and it was not that of Britain.

Happy Birthday, Americans. I am happy to be alive in a country still bristling with opportunity and still a shining a powerful light seen by the oppressed and the oppressors everywhere.

 

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How To Write A How To

This article tells you how to write a how to, a skill you can take with you in almost any field and convert into hard, cold cash while simultaneously advertising your skills for the next job you get, even if not’s not writing. I’ve made a lot of money teaching people how to do things for decades, and I never saw all the elements of writing a good how to in one place. Instead, I studied the most popular, effective, and successful examples and came up this with short set of principles. It’s been drawn from applied psychology, wildly popular products from companies like Apple and Microsoft, and low-key sales techniques.

Make A Promise. Deliver it. Explain What It Meant

There’s a reason your English teacher didn’t make money as a writer. She didn’t have to worry about wasting people’s precious lives. The saying goes that you should tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and tell them what you said. Bull. Here’s what you should really do.

  • Promise them you’ll improve their lives and how you’ll do it
  • Show them something step by step
  • Tell them what it meant

1. Promise them you’ll improve their lives,and how

A how to is a promise to solve a problem, often one that will be painful. So instead of telling people you’re going to explain how to install WordPress, you tell them you’re going to teach them how to fire their webmaster and instantly create a website they can maintain themselves.

Keep It As Short As You’d Want It To Be

Keep your how to as short as possible. Even if you’re paid to write by the word, don’t treat your job that way. People don’t have any time for anything anymore. Solve the problem as quickly as you can, without leaving anything out.  Write short, punchy sentences without too many commas, colons, or semicolons. Avoid big words. Your English teacher liked them. Your readers just get agitated.

Use The Rule of 5. Or 7, Whatever

People can’t retain more than 3-5 items at a time. Write your sections in groups of 3 or 5-maybe 7 at most. Anything with sequences of more than 7 items to perform or to remember at once probably needs to be reorganized.

Start By Selling

Assume they don’t know how they got here. Somewhere in the first paragraph orient the user who was sent here by someone else by explaining what you’re going to teach them and why it’s a good thing. You may think that because they’re here, they have a good reason. You’re wrong. 

They may have landed on a web page someone else recommended. They may have been handed a printed document by a boss and aren’t certain what to do. Make them feel good about reading what you’re going to write. That includes making them comfortable from the first paragraph, and they can’t be comfortable if they are constantly wondering why they’re here.

The best salespeople are famous not for shoving their product or service down their customers’ throats, but for explaining clearly what the problem is and how it can be solved with what they’re selling. And in today’s world, everyone is doing sales. You must be forever vigilant in branding yourself and your employer.

2. Show Them Something Step By Step

Before you start writing, jot down each step you must cover in a separate line or paragraph. Then go through the process yourself, and add anything you omitted. Start each section with a summary of what they’ll learn in that section and how it fits into the bigger picture. Break the how to part into separate steps.

Bullets In The Head. Ing.

Bullets are your friend. Headings are your friend. People don’t read these days. They scan. (By the way-the correct, original meaning of scan is the opposite of how it’s used. It used to mean an exhaustive, complete consumption of the material–just like a scanner. But that’s not how it’s used anymore, so I’m reluctantly going with the flow.) 

Readers will unconsciously jump from headline to headline before they do any actual reading. Your writing teacher probably wanted you to write in a huge undifferentiated mass of text. That made Dickens rich–a hundred fifty years ago. Get with the program. Headings (a line of text set aside from the material using a different size, typeface, or type style) help the reader ignore what doesn’t matter and dive right in to what does.

Here’s how to use a heading. Anytime you have a sef-contained concept, it probably deserves a heading, plus anywhere form a sentence to a paragraph summing up that concept. Depending on the level of difficulty, you may also want to explain why knowing that concept will help the reader. 

Most word processors or online document editors such as Google Docs have a control that lets you choose Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. Use them whenever possible. They normally convert to special HTML instructions when published on the web. These instructions help search engines and your human readers decide what needs emphasis.

The rule for using bullets is simple and widely ignored. Use one per step or per important concept. So instead of saying this, which is actually three steps :

  • Put the grated carrots into a pot of boiling water

You’d break down the steps in the way people expect them to happen:

  • Start a pot of water boiling
  • Grate the carrots
  • Drop them into the boiling water
Like headings, bullets help cement concepts together in people’s minds. Even more important, when your reader refers back to what you wrote because they didn’t quite understand something, they can jump directly to the bullets and follow along. Not forcing them to read a lot just to find their place saves their psychic energy for completing their task.

3. Tell them what it meant

This is perhaps my only original contribution to the whole enterprise of writing. Your teacher was wrong about the summary. The summary shouldn’t tell your readers what you said. Duh, they just read it-they already know what you said! Instead, it should tell them what it meant and how their lives are better for knowing what you just taught them. It should therefore explain how you made good on your initial promise. 

That’s hard. It’s easy to say “We’ve learned how to install WordPress on your website, write blog posts, and create pages.” Instead, it should say something like “It’s no longer possible for one person to create an maintain a complex website from scratch. WordPress does all the hard parts for you, and makes adding anything from a blog post to a whole new section no harder than a word processor. There’s plenty more to learn but this set of articles showed you everything you need to get a credible website built in under a day. Remember to update it frequently for security purposes, and see our next set of articles if you want to learn how to create an event calendar or back up so that you won’t lose critical data at the worst possible time.”

In an increasingly complex world, everything needs to be explained: manuals, sales material, websites establishing you as an authority. Words are more important than ever, and these same concepts can be applied to video learning too. The organization, promise, and fulfillment of the promise remain constant no matter what the medium.

Speaking of which: Summarize everything up front, break things up into little pieces, use short declarative sentences, and embrace the bullet. You can’t go wrong writing a how to if you follow those principles. Even better: everything you write is proof that you’re an expert in your field, and will show your next boss that your knowledge is so deep you can how to write a how to better than anyone else: what better reason to hire you?

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