I was geared down for a quiet day when I got the call. It seems y’day the doggie wigs made the front page in the Miami Herald. This is great, because it solidifies a number of things that were known to be going right despite delays and lack of positive feedback. The dog in question, Natalia, was abused and had lost fur. Thanks to a pink wig and the 761,000+ people who saw the ad, the dog was adopted.
The Herald has a curious page they emailed, stating that the “value” of this coverage was $1,480. It was front page, with a ¼ page picture of the event. However, in typical Florida fashion, I could not find either the paper or the on-line command to view this article the very next day.
Ruth was justifiably happy with this and it does open a new potential market. I had to cancel my PHP meeting today to get there. I did manage to contact Sean in Yiwu. He sent a very concise email explaining what he pays his employees ($200 to $400 per month each) and why he prefers to deal with me directly. In return for this honesty, I asked him to pursue my small order for 100 Lighter Cameras.
To make this more speculative, I also sent him my plans for “100% English”. Most of you won’t know what that is, so I’ll go into it. Ill-formed or badly translated user manuals from the Orient can range from humorous to annoying to outright dangerous. Two years ago I began offering my “translation” services to the factories, but never got a single response. Hear me out, there is a reason I put quotations around the word.
What can be as bad as poor wording is a user manual written by a college type who does not understand the subject. Ah, I see a glimmer of recognition. There has to be a balance between academics and street smarts to produce a good manual. My market cubbyhole has always been that balance. Those with better grammar get too technical, those with less tend to write badly if at all. I can cover both bases. See, didn’t I tell everyone those Chinese lessons Judy took for me back in 1971 would pay off?
True, my Chinese is very limited. But I’ll match it up against any competition around this joint. I have very little fear that if I make money, a few thousand people from a place like Florida are going to suddenly be able to compete with me. Ha, in fact, I’d like to see them try. I know the subjects I write about. Yes, explaining this to Sean was difficult, especially my price of $250 per page. I know that we have to create and “arms war”. To do this, I want him to establish a contact in Yiwu whom we will help for free so that later, everyone must have the service.
It will not take long for the superiority of my writing to take effect. I have looked very closely at the quality of the Asian manuals for several years. The secondary effect is to approach the factories that want us to purchase volumes of 10,000 items. Explain to them that I must “evaluate” 50 or 100 of their product to get the manual just right. If you think this is not viable, ask yourself what the value of a user manual in “100% English” is going to do to the competition over there. Right. Now you are thinking.
Let’s see what is in the unusual department today. This actress or her agent inquired today about a possible “celebrity” style doggie wig. We had already thought about this but such items are custom orders. That is apparently a picture of Jennifer Aniston’s dog. Her hairdo is called the “Rachel”. (I call it “brunette”.) I immediately wrote to Marion that this was for all the people who meet me and ever say, “What next?”We also got some hate mail. Some crackpot out there, a female, thinks that Ruth is betraying her people by showing blonde wigs in her shop window. The letter suggests that anything except “black non-European” hair is unacceptable. Figure that one out.
I pedaled over to Aventura to make the deposit and spent an hour at Borders on the return. I found a good book on birdhouses, one of those things I’ll never get around to. I also took a very close look at more PHP code. All of these “modern” languages make the use of databases over the Internet far more complicated than it should be. Even the authors tend to talk indirectly about things where what is called for is a series of good concrete examples that work. Even if they don’t cover all the bases, at least put something there that functions and let people embellish it later.
These books begin to make me aware of several incidents I thought were pretty weird at one time. That manual I wrote for Jackson Hospital and the way that Arturo, Fred’s database friend, may provide an explanation to why they think differently about databases than I do. I’m beginning to see that if I had learned database from a drawn-out trial and error standpoint, I would see things their way. They tend to view the database as part of a larger system that involves other disciplines, where I see it as an end in itself. Don’t expect this to make sense, for I can just barely visualize subtle things that offer clues to why these folks consistently underestimate others around them all the time. Talking with them gets pretty weird very quickly for they assume you could not possibly know what they know.
Roland, my French-Canadien neighbor (or is that neighbour? Or Canadian?) has returned. I assured him everything was quiet for the last few weeks. Big Al called. He still cannot get those sales scripts to unzip, so I’ll head over there tomorrow. For the record, I threw away a pair of classy dress slacks that just don’t fit me any more. You decide why.
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