It’s often interesting to note the attitude displayed towards me as young guy who doesn’t wear a suit to work as a matter of principle.

It’s scary, in fact, to realise just how much of an impact our outward appearance has on business and everyday dealings (and hey, time and a shopping trip would “fix” my problems…)

• We couldn’t possible be in the market for expensive laptops at a high-end store
• I was asked if I need help while waiting in ANZ’s airport-departure-lounge branch. When I said I was interested in business banking (I was holding the brochure) the customer service person told me - “No, you should be looking at this one”, whilst handing me their more standard “student” fodder.
• “Your technical skills are great, but we’re looking for people with X years of project experience”, a.k.a “You are too young”.

I think the world should be more afraid of the people who can choose what they wear - because they own the company.

(For non-Kiwis, GETS is the Government Electronic Tender System)

GETS is cool. Seriously. It emails me a ton of RFIs and EOIs that I might be interested in. And somewhere within that sea of acronyms I’m sure some people make a heck of a lot of money.

Not us.

The typical GETS entry asks for something like the following:

• The last 3 years’ financial records for your company (We’ve been in business barely 3 months)
• How many DBAs we have on staff (ummm… 2?)
• How many QA staff members we have (ummm… 2?)
• Details of any National/International contracts, or how many institutions are using our solution overseas (gosh)

There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s perfectly reasonable due diligence when you’re talking about a six (or more) figure project. The kind of project that the Datacoms, Frondes and Intergens of this world will be all over.

What I want is a mini-GETS. I want to know about the little projects that are going on inside government. The $5,000 - $30,000 projects that Code to Customer can kick ass on. The ones that we can spec, build, test and deploy in the time it takes to gather responses to a DataFrondeGen-size RFP.

Where can I find those?

My Victoria is the new “campus portal” we’re all being forced to use at our university. It’s powered by some software from Sungard Higher Education - a company with offices in Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Good on Vic for supporting New Zealand.

I’d perhaps be less bitter if the thing wasn’t terrible. There are just so many things that could be so easily improved. Rather than write another iPayroll rant however, I think I’ll just show you a representative screen.

Yep, that’s what I see when I visit My Victoria. I’m using Firefox 3, which is relatively new, but you’ll note that the “Supported Browser” list excludes Firefox 2.x and Safari 3, and that the system still has “some issues” with Internet Explorer 7 (which is over a year old).

It actually works “fine” for me once I click “continue”. Does it really need a whitelist? Perhaps they need to think about using bug detection rather than browser sniffing.

I’m afraid to think about how much Victoria paid for this.

Paperclip is a cool new alternative to attachment_fu for uploading files in Rails.

(There’s a good tutorial on Jim Neath’s blog)

The only gotcha I’ve run into so far is regenerating thumbnails. With attachment_fu, you just re-save your models. For Paperclip, there is a rake task.

rake paperclip:refresh CLASS=YourModelName

Hopefully that saves someone ten minutes of Googling :)

When we started Code to Customer, Oliver and I decided that it would be hard, no, scratch that, impossible to be productive workers without brand new MacBook pros.

So we’ve treated ourselves! Yes, they are suitably shiny and super-quick.

There’s a bit of a saga behind the purchase. First of all, we walked into Magnum Mac, on Vivian Street. We’d just been paid, and we wanted our computers yesterday.

I don’t think I’ve ever been given worse service. The guy was completely out of it, we had to actually find him and force him to help us. We made sure he knew that we were a guaranteed sale (and not a small one either) but he seemed determined to drive us away. He made no eye contact, seemed sleepy and disinterested, and he knew nothing about the hardware he was supposedly selling.

His manager, or someone I assumed was his manager, was filling shelves close by, and aside from yelling across to fill in his somewhat gappy knowledge occasionally she didn’t seem too worried about helping him out. So we left, secure in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be back.

And to the Apple Store it was! (I wonder if Magnum Mac mind - do they still get some revenue from the Apple Store in New Zealand?).

The experience here was awesome. We customised, tweaked and configured to our heart’s content, and soon we had the perfect pair of MacBook Pros. Apple sent us an email, letting us know they’d be shipped out in the next week, and then arrive by the 14th of July. Not instant, but not too bad given our inherent hacker’s need to “adjust”.

I’m sitting here typing this on the 3rd of July, fully two weeks before we intended to get anything. We ordered on a Friday, Apple emailed us on Sunday to let us know they’d finished and had handed everything over to TNT.

So we headed on over to the (somewhat confusing) TNT shipment tracker, and refreshed every couple of hours. Fingers were crossed that we wouldn’t share Lance’s TNT experience.

But, despite an entry on the tracker reading “Incorrect and/or incomplete address entered” and a brief (weird?) stopoff in Hong Kong on their way from Shanghai, our new “work tools” arrived in a timely fashion this morning.

I’m still savouring the new-apple-product smell.