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Win the battle, lose the war?

I was in court yesterday, suing a former client who refused to pay for work I’d done. After a year and a half of broken promises, I finally went to court over the issue. I won– by default– because the guy didn’t even bother to show up. Yippee, I should get my money now, right?

Of course not. Now begins the exciting process of “discovery” where I submit papers to the court (at cost to me, of course) to force him to reveal his debtors– clients or otherwise. I could also ask for bank account numbers, but I have those. The problem is, I called the bank to see if there’s enough money in the account to cover the court-ordered payment, and there isn’t. He could easily open a new account somewhere, use it instead of the old one, and I’d never know. More to the point, he could refuse to disclose his debtors and I wouldn’t have anywhere to turn to get the money.

So I’ve learned, through hard experience, that you can be a complete idiot and refuse to pay for things, and in the end you can get away with it. The only way I’ll ever see my money is if I persist– perhaps over the course of a year or more– and in the end it’s a question of whether it’s worth my time and headache to collect.

Sigh.

At times it’s hard to be a “nice guy” in business. This morning I had a meeting with a longtime client to discuss a project that would mean several months of steady work and a check for fifty grand at the end. Yet as we were talking about the project, it became apparent that what I was proposing might not be quite what they really needed.

So, rather than trying to push them into a solution that would’ve been expensive (although very cool), I suggested they explore some other options and have me do some integration work, rather than full development. I probably cost myself the contract, and certainly won’t be taking home the big check, but in the end I feel better about it. After all, I’m in business to help clients. Paying the mortgage is just a nice side benefit.

Alex to Kyra:

“I noticed that your burps are almost as loud as mom’s.”

I’ve got bilingual kids. Tonight at dinner Zack was standing up in his chair (a favorite pastime) and Kyra– always the disciplinarian– pointed at him and shouted:

“Zack, NO COMPRENDO!”

At the airport the other day it was hard to tell which group outnumbered the other: the security screeners or the passengers. There was literally an army of white-shirted FAA people running people through the scanners. It was almost comical, seeing a line of people standing at attention (with their rubber gloves on) waiting for the chance to “wand” someone who sets off the beeper.

This time I left my pocketknife at home.

Laralee and I saw “The Two Towers” this afternoon. Opening day, of course.

All I have to say is that the movie is awesome on a grand scale– yet at the same time, it has disturbing digressions from the plot in the book. It’s as if Peter Jackson took the characters and the situations from the book, and kind of made up his own little story with them. Even
more so than FOTR, this movie twists characters and events in a way that may make for good cinematics but, in my opinion, lessens the story Tolkien wrote.

Anyway, it’s fun to watch and I’ll definitely get the DVD (will there be an extended edition with another hour of footage?)…

I spent all day yesterday working on Christmas cards. First I picked a bunch of pictures, resized and cropped them, and tiled them into a big (page-size) mosaic. Then I spent an hour or so writing the big ol’ form letter. In one sense, I despise form letters because they’re terribly impersonal– and everyone knows it. In another sense, when I’m sending 200+ cards I don’t have a lot of choice.

In the Good Old Days ™ I would handwrite a couple paragraphs in every card I sent. People got their personalized messages, and everything was good. The years went by, and each year I find that my list of recipients has grown. At some point it just became impractical to write so much… sadly.

After finishing The Letter, I put my printer through its paces. It’s a color laser printer– very sweet– but I’m running dangerously low on my drum kit life (whatever that is). So I was just hoping the printer would make it through 200 front-and-back solid full-color pages. It did.

Then came the envelopes. Usually I print address labels (recipient and return address) and then we spend a bunch of time peeling them off and sticking them on each envelope. Instead, this year I printed directly on the envelope, which allowed me to put a cute picture of the kids in Santa hats right on the envelope.

The last step, of course, was the actual folding, stuffing, and stamping. Laralee and I worked together this morning and did all of them in about two hours. That included brief (one-line, mostly) handwritten messages to each person, and in the end we had a huge stack of stamped envelopes.

Now I’ve got to do another 40 or so for my clients…

Today’s Client Moment is sponsored by Sprint, my bandwidth provider.

A client sent me an e-mail with an attachment that’s 155MB. Yes, that’s megabytes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an e-mail message larger than perhaps 10MB or so. He definitely takes the cake with this one.

The real problem occurred when I tried to run it through my spam filters and it brought the software to its knees. After disabling the filters, I’m trying to download it (again) and will see what happens.

One of the great songs in music history is U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.

I was listening to it and thinking how funny it is that although I’m nearly 31 (yikes!) I indeed haven’t found my path in life. While I don’t necessarily believe in fate or predestination, I think everyone has a mission, a goal, to fulfill. I also believe that at some point– maybe when you’re 12, maybe when you’re 88– you know what that goal is.

I still haven’t found it. But I’m having a good time looking.

Wow. My BitRelay servers have survived their trial by fire… over the past five days, one of my clients’ web sites was hit 3.4 million times by more than half a million distinct users. I have no idea what the guy did to get that kind of traffic (neither does he), but it brought my network connection to its knees and slowed down all the other sites (obviously, since there was quite a line to get in!).

Still, I can’t help but be a little proud that the server handled 3.4M page requests– along with all my other client web and e-mail traffic– without even a burp.

Linux rocks.