TeaBass.com

Thought 5

We’ve been taking loads of photos this afternoon, you can see some at my flickr, and some on LaurenF.net (the first ten are new)

Thought 4

I still have a few things left to do on teabass like the links page, about me and putting something in the bubble on every page, but it’s coming along nicely. Thanks for everyones words of advise and tips, keep them coming. Check out Feedicons.com it’s pretty cool.

Wikipedia flawed?

I got a little annoyed with wikipedia the other day. I was googling my own name and it came up with a wikipedia entry for Andrew Nesbitt, but it wasn’t me.

It was in fact a famous Scottish rally driver of the same name, I can understand why he was there (recently was on the news for winning an English rally)… he is more famous than me, but what happens if I do get famous?

He is the first, I’m sure they won’t remove him if I became more famous, but how will that work? Jus because he came before me puts me at a disadvantage, when people search for me in wikipedia (if I get “famous”) they will find him instead, a little unfair if you ask me.

Or in the spirit of wikipedia I could change the entry to me, I’m Andrew Nesbitt and as long as I write a honest, unbiased history of me what’s to say that that is wrong?

I struggle to think of an example of two famous people with the same name, but I’m sure it has happened before, do they just go on the most famous or well known person gets first pick or has more weight behind them to force their name to the front?

Wikipedia works great as a knowledge base for science, and history and factorial based content, but as soon as you start making lots of people allowed to put in their own “profile” it almost has a myspace-esque quality to it.

I’m not positive, but it would make sense if printed encyclopaedia’s only included people who have died (so their details and achievements can’t change), why not do that with wikipedia?

Or how about introducing a set of categories to allow more people to be added without blocking others? i.e. put Andrew Nesbitt (the rally driver) in Motorsport and me in Technology or Blogging

Wikipedia has become a great source of information and I would hate to see it fall into disarray due to problems like this, but as they allow anyone to create entry’s about pretty much anything including people (famous or not-so famous) something needs to be done to the organization of it before it gets messy.

Thought 3

I’ve tried to make sure that teabass has valid XHTML and CSS as much as possible.

You can check the links here: XHTML & CSS. At the moment there is only 1 error to do with the javascript opening and closing divs, any ideas how I could fix or replace this?

Predicament

My business is starting to take off, it’s still a month or two away from being fully set up, but I’m well on my way.

And so I have been looking towards the future.

A big concern of mine is non-paying customers, I hope I never have one, but let’s face it, it will probably happen sooner or later. I do some work for someone, fix their computer and they refuse to pay for it, what do I do?

There are ways to sort out problems like this, obviously taking them to court is one option, but the amount of time and effort involved in following up problems in such a manner may not be worth it.

I came up with an idea.

You geeks are not going to like it, but the businessmen would love it.

I install a small piece of software on every computer I fix, it remains unseen by the user and sits dormant on their hard drive for 2 weeks, 99% of customers will have paid me within a week and when they do I make the piece of software I installed delete itself via the internet. For the customers who have not paid, the software remains on their computer.

After 2 weeks the program I installed runs and opens a window asking them to contact me due to them not paying for their service yet. This message remains on the screen until I tell the software to stop via the internet after they have paid their bill.

The equivalent of having your phone line or electricity cut off, you just have your computer “cut off”, an obvious incentive for the customer to pay their bill, so they can use their computer again.

I can hear the screams now!!

“You can’t do that!”, “Just as bad as M$”, “it’s like DRM”, “invasion of privacy”

But put yourself in my position, they have already used your service and are refusing to pay, basically stealing.

What if they cannot pay? Then perhaps they should not have asked for the service in the first place?
Don’t worry, I’m not going to implement anything like this in my business.

I believe it would just cause problems and turn customers away from me, but it made me think a lot, question my values and most of all, I saw from Microsoft’s point of view.I understood why they put digital rights management and other annoying anti-piracy functions in their programs.

I still think they do it in a very bad way, (only yesterday DRM put my mum off ever buying music downloads just because of the hassle and time it took to put a free mp3 she won onto her mobile), but I can see why they have to do it, it’s all a numbers game.

The percentage of people who have no trouble with DRM and anti-piracy is large, which equals a lot of people, they don’t mind it and they don’t mind paying for Microsoft’s products.
(This may be partly because they don’t realise that there are open source alternatives, but that is for another day)

My business is only small, and it’s not going to reach anywhere near the size when problems like that would become a regular issue anytime soon, but it’s interesting to think about the future.