SuperJason’s Personal Blog

I recently read an interesting article called “How to tip like a gentleman“. It was posted on Digg, and most of the comments disagreed with the article. There seems to be a lot of people that think our entire tipping system is ridiculous, and I for one agree.

Here is a comment from the Digg article: “I was paid 2.63 an hour to wait tables over the summer. I would get paychecks of about 1.23 after taxes.”

What? This comment doesn’t make any sense. That would mean you worked less than an hour in a 2 week period. Ok, so let’s assume that it was just a typo. Then you’re just a liar, and I’ll explain how it works. There are 2 minimum wage levels. The restaurants pay the servers the lesser of the two, UNLESS their tips don’t make up the difference. For example, if they go an hour without any tips, they’ll make the $5.15 minimum wage. I’m not saying that’s good, I’m just saying you can’t use the alternative minimum wage argument.

The tipping article suggests tipping with percentages. He suggests tipping up to $100 just for the guy that seats you at a 4 star restaurant. If that is the norm, I’m in the wrong profession. For that much money, I could seat people like nobody’s business.

Many people suggest that tipping should no longer be expected. Apparently in many other countries, a tip is only normal if the person did something truly exceptional.

Now, as for the entire percentage based system. I think this is completely absurd. The value of what you carry should have little to no impact on the amount of your tip. Imagine winning $1,000,000 on Deal or no Deal, only to have Howie ask for 20% because he carried you the check.

I actually had a guy get pissed because I gave him a $3 tip for delivering 5 pizzas. OH MY GOD, 5 PIZZAS, HOW DID HE EVER DO IT? If I would have ordered 1 pizza, he would have been happy. Next time, I’m going to pick it up myself, so I hope you can stretch out that $3 until you find a new job. And by the way, the pizza companies now have a delivery fee, which the driver does NOT get.

People think the percentage based system works well, because if you’re at a nicer restaurant, the employees are typically better at their job, and expect a better tip. That sounds nice and fluffy if you look at it in that direction. Effectively, you’re saying “screw you” to the hard working employees at places with reasonably priced food. Case in point, my wife used to work at Perkins. Their food is very reasonably priced compared to most places. Because of that, she was tipped poorly. Another co-worker told me one time that the best employees end up working at the more expensive restaurants. That’s not always the case. Perkins was close to our home, and she liked it there.

If we’re going to stick with the percentage based tip, then McDonald’s employees should get tips as well. At 15%, they would be making an excellent wage! Maybe that’s what we need to get good service at fast food restaurants.

Every place I’ve worked at told me that I was not allowed to accept tips. Thanks for that. I have to pay tips my whole life, but never get to be the recipient.

So what is my tipping philosophy? Do well, get a good tip. Do poorly, get little to no tip.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not because I’m cheap. I’ve tipped $10 for a $25 meal. The waitress was one of the happiest people I ever met. Her happiness rubbed off on my wife and I. It was worth the extra money.

Ok, I’m better now.

In my area, Green Bay, there is no way to get the local Fox station in high definition, except through an antenna. Of course you also need an ASTC tuner to decode the digital signal.

As I was watching the superbowl in high definition, on Fox, an ad for Time Warner cable came on. It was a standard definition commercial, talking about how great their HD programming was.

In short, this is ironic because:

• Time warner was advertising HD service on a channel they have failed to broadcast in HD
• Time warner was advertising HD service with a standard definition commercial
• Their HD programming sucks balls

It took a little searching to figure out how to do an “exclusive or” in a check constraint. Here you go, you’re welcome:

(IsNull([ColA],[ColB]) Is Not Null And ([ColA] Is Null Or [ColB] Is Null))

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I’m not uploading any new photos. The truth is, you’re looking in the wrong place! A couple of weeks ago, I decided to work on getting all of my photos on Flickr.

Why you ask? Let me tell you:

• Flickr is a lot more popular. While it’s not directly one of the reasons that I switched, it means that a LOT more sites interface with them. For example, I just posted a Flickr link to a Facebook comment today, and realized that it let me choose a photo from the link as a thumbnail. Cool!
  (Fotki popularity is in Red, Flickr in blue)
• Amazing API. Just about everything you can do on the site, you can also do through their extensive API. This means that if you don’t like something about their site, you can rewrite it! For example, their uploader sucks, and didn’t really work the way I wanted. So I went ahead and wrote my own. For .NET, there is FlickerNET, for Adobe flex, they have built in support. Yahoo! pipes even has out of the box support.
• Better organizational functionality. This one is tough. I think Flickr is hard to navigate for the end user, but their organizing system does make sense. Fotki is really strict and gives you folders and albums. A photo cannot belong to multiple albums unless you upload it to both locations. With Flickr, I can have an album/set for photos of Ryan, and have some of those photos belong to a set of photos I took at his birthday party.
• More ways to look at your photos. With Flickr, you can browse by date uploaded, date taken, set, tag, etc. Pretty much any way you can think of. And like I mentioned, you can make your own page to browse the images if you don’t like theirs.

While deciding if I wanted to switch, I needed to figure out an easy way to get all my photos on their site. Since their API is so good, I wrote my own program to synchronize all of my photos. Others have written similar programs, but they required setting up symphonizing setting for each folder/set. I wrote my program so that I point it to one folder, and it keeps all photos in all sub-folders synchronized. The set names are based off of the folder names. If I update the tags for a set of photos, it uses their API to just update the tags. The photos don’t need to be uploaded again.

Once my program was complete, I pointed it at my photos, and let it run for a couple of days. When it was done, I had all of my 4000+ photos up there. I’m sold.

Now, I’m just working on tagging my old photos, and taking out some of the out-takes.

Yesterday I did something pretty cool. I actually placed a call with 2-way streaming video! I know it’s not anything new, but it was pretty cool.

My parents are going to be in Atlanta for a couple of years, so we want to be able to keep in touch visually. We want our kids to be able to talk to them and see them.

We tried it using Skype and some old webcams that my mom had laying around. The bandwidth is great, but the camera quality was pretty bad. So, I started Googling.

Apparently, pretty much all webcams are really crappy. One of the only webcams that seems to have good reviews is the Logitech QuickCam 9000. It’s a little pricey, but it seems that if you go any cheaper, the quality gets bad real quick. One of the reviews had this sample, comparing it to the Apple iSight:

I don’t know about you, but the difference is pretty astonishing. The iSight is a pretty decent webcam, and very popular, but there is no contest.

I’m thinking about purchasing the 9000, and then start creating some “bonus” blog posts on YouTube. I can then embed them into blog entries. It might be a good way to get some extra exposure for my blog.

• Alex Wyatt Young
• Born 12/31/07 at 9:37am
• Weight: 7lbs 10oz
• Length 20″
• Nickname: Tax deduction

Photos here

Some people have made the observation that I haven’t posted any updates recently. It’s not because of a lack of news, it’s quite the opposite problem.

As I mentioned, I started my new job recently. Things have been going very well, and I’ve been enjoying it very much. I’m getting a chance to work on a lot of new and interesting projects. The best part is that there is very little overhead. I’m just able to write some great software the way it should be written, and be recognized for it.

To help you understand the lack of posts, I need to explain how my brain functions. When I’m working on a project, I start thinking about all the tasks that need to be completed, which is probably fairly normal. However, I quickly make a list of all of the things that I don’t know how to do. Until those issues are resolved, my mind won’t let me rest. Fortunately, once those problems are worked out, the project is usually a breeze, and I can sleep good at night.

For the project I’m currently working on, there were a couple of big pieces that I needed to work through. Now that I have a good grasp on how they will get finished, I’m pretty happy.

Sorry for the boring update, but at least it’s something. In one of my next posts, I’ll be talking about Adobe Flex, and how it can be a great way to write an application targeting the flash platform.

P.S. While writing this post, I accidentally typed “boring” as “borning”. Upon looking at the spelling suggestions, I got a little bit of a chuckle. (see picture on right)

Over a year ago, I blogged about how I didn’t want to use Gmail. I did however, want to utilize their spam filtering.

Well, now that Gmail supports just about every feature you can think of, I’ve decided to make the switch. I used to like the speed of having all my email on a local IMAP server, but I’ve decided that GMail is just good enough. And the best part is that I can access it with IMAP if I really want to, now that they’ve added that functionality.

I upgraded my Google apps account to the premium version, and that let me import all my email from home Dovecot email server at home. The whole process took about 6 hours, and now I have all of my email available anywhere, and quickly searchable. I then downgraded my free trial. Even with 4+ years of email (6000+ messages), I’m only using 349MB of my available 4800MB. In fact, I think the space is growing much faster than I’m using it.

The other advantage to using Gmail is that I can access it anywhere that I can access the web. That means even proxies are not a problem. Before, I was pretty much required to have my laptop with me.

I also recently discovered that you can check POP3 accounts with your gmail account. That means that I can start getting mail again with my old road runner account.

Now I can live without the hassle of configuring, maintaining, and backing up my email solution at home. Now I just have to figure out a way to back up my Gmail account in case they mess up.

It was a good weekend. Friday night, we all went to Heritage Hill for a Halloween event. Ryan got to go trick or treating at all of the historical buildings.

From the moment he got his dragon costume on, he was roaring at everyone. They all got quite a kick out of it. Many of the employees suggested entering him in the costume contest.

There were probably around 50 contestants in the costume contest, so it was pretty stiff competition. One of the costumes even included a complete pirate ship that must have taken hours to build.

During the competition, Ryan keep roaring when they would look at him. He won the contest for most creative costume. They said that the roaring sold it. He won a $5 gift certificate for the gift ship, and he’ll be getting his photo into one of the local newspapers. With his gift certificate, he bought a horse drawn carriage and a tractor.

The next day (Saturday for those not keeping track), we went to Nick & Kirsten’s annual Halloween bash in Neenah. They always throw great Halloween parties, and this year was no exception. They had great food, and prizes for different things. There were bones to find for booty, a pirate quiz, and a jar of candy where you had to guess the quantity. I counted the candy on one size of the jar, and then multiplied it out to get a rough estimate. It turns out I was the closest the right amount by far. I guessed 235, and there were 260 pieces.

It was a great weekend, but now I have to get some work done around the house today…