• monkeyPushButton (unregistered) in reply to Wooble
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.
    Wooble:
    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.
    universe man:
    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.
    I'm more impressed that his watch can tell if it has traveled through a temporal anomoly and adjust itself acordingly.
  • (cs) in reply to monkeyPushButton
    monkeyPushButton:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.
    Wooble:
    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.
    universe man:
    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.
    I'm more impressed that his watch can tell if it has traveled through a temporal anomoly and adjust itself acordingly.
    You mean yours doesn't?
  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to LAN Mind
    LAN Mind:
    Hey, you gotta give it to the old codger; he wanted the web site all along, and was only constrained by likely even older codgers.
    BTDT with Linux. Back in the early 1990's, we in software development wanted to do a Linux port of our commercial database package. TPTB wanted nothing to do with it. After all, Linux wouldn't last, since there's no way a free O/S could support itself.

    Now, this was in the 0.9 kernel days, and the license restrictions of the day probably would have made it impossible to sell a program without releasing source code as well, but we saw the potential. (We even played around with it by "sacrificing" one older system to be a Linux box, and doing the port on our own time "just for fun".) They eventually released a Linux version, some 10 years later.

  • Unknown Unknowns (unregistered) in reply to T Bank
    T Bank:
    The web is not a magazine.

    Or a newspaper.

    Or a TV set.

    Or a movie.

    It's the web dammit. Still can't get people to hear that.

    You know how an anti-proton is like a proton, except antimatter instead of matter?

    Is the parent statement anti-"get off my lawn"?

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    I think sporting goods is a pretty cool guy. eh has ace in the hole and doesn't afraid of anything

  • Georgem (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    This story is so cringingly absurd, I'd really like to know which parts of it weren't made up.

    Ask.com

    They're real. You can google 'em and everything

  • A Muffin (unregistered) in reply to Wooble
    Wooble:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.

    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.

    Still a WTF. Do you really need the year on your watch?

    P.S. this is the first comment ever!

  • (cs) in reply to Bobby Tables
    Bobby Tables:
    LoztInSpace:
    Let me guess. Eventually someone came along and saved the company by putting together some PHP/MySQL injection riddled piece of crap and thought they were god's gift to the world of computing and commerce.
    Well, what do you expect for $2,000?

    Look, I say we store the price of the item in the web page itself, and the total order price in a cookie. Should make our site very popular!

    i'd setup a Drupal uebercart for $2000 ... would be less than 4 hours of work :D

  • Danny V (unregistered) in reply to AnnyNMoose

    I just laughed for a minute straight. Thanks for that.

    As an added bonus - CAPTCHA: (for the immature CAPTCHA files): appellatio (it's kind of like practicing on a banana but a lot more difficult)

  • Douglas Adams (unregistered) in reply to Wooble
    Wooble:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.

    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.

    Yawn, do you still think they're a pretty neat idea?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to sammy baby
    sammy baby:
    I believe this story, absolutely.

    Back in the day, I was doing some work as a systems administrator for a small regional ISP. One of my clients was a guy who had a microscopy supply company - they sold lab equipment to schools, research facilities, basically anyone with a need to look at reeeeeeally small things. They were fully on board with what they used to call "internet commerce" back when we still felt like we needed a name for it: the cost savings they'd realized on not having to ship a paper catalog anymore was more than enough to justify hiring a few college kids to maintain their site.

    At the time, it was powered by a horrible mix of CGI scripts which drove an order-form based (read: no shopping cart) which sent credit card information around in unencrypted e-mails. (When I raised this concern with the owner, he looked surprised. "Most people I know are comfortable buying things on the Internet," he said. "That's because they know that the companies they deal with are taking steps to protect their payment information," I replied. "You're not. I know because I run your site for you.")

    But the owner was convinced that his site was truly groundbreaking, and one day he called my office on his cell phone to share a big new idea with me. After about fifteen minutes of lead in where he basically tried to warm me up on how great the site has been for him so far, he said, "So here's my idea: I want to be able to update the price of an item in my database, and have it show up on the web, in real time."

    I managed to get out the word "Well," before he cut me off. "I have to go now, I'm getting an MRI done on my brain and they say I need to turn off my cell phone. But I'll call you back about this later." He never did.

    Another time, he sent me a very angry e-mail demanding to know why his site was down. I tested accessing the site from my desktop, and Google Translate, and glanced at the server logs - all suggested perfectly normal activity. When I told him so, his next email became indignant. "Well, I'm in Beijing right now at a client's site, and I can't get to the site at all." When I asked him if he'd tried speaking to any technical support resources there, he responded, as if speaking to a child, "I can't talk to anyone here. They all speak Chinese."

    Oh, and about those college kids - the head college kid called me up in my office one day, sounding a bit sheepish, and said, "Um, the boss asked me to call you. Do you have any reason to think that the server has been hacked?"

    I grew alarmed, immediately started watching system activity, looking for alarms, anything - but everything looked normal. "Um... no. Why?"

    "Well," intern replied, "we have these pictures on our site - they're jpeg images of the products."

    "Yeah?"

    "Well, we have a few of them, and they're supposed to be in color, but they're now in black and white."

    I paused a few moments to wait for the next sentence, but it didn't come. "Um," I said, "are you asking me if someone broke into your web site and replaced your color images with black and white ones?"

    There was a long pause, and when he spoke again, he sounded even more sheepish. "I told you," he said, "he told me to call you."

    [image]
  • PaulG. (unregistered) in reply to stewieatb

    Careful. Old does not necessarily make you stupid. Tech-illiterate people are not necessarily stupid. Which leads me to believe this story is bullshit, made up by some punk wanting to make old, tech-illiterate folks look "stupid". I hope this punk gets busted bit torrenting Michael Jackson with children videos.

  • R. Mullen (unregistered) in reply to AndrewB

    My thought EXACTLY!

  • JohnFx (unregistered) in reply to universe man
    universe man:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.

    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.

    ...and when they meet it's a happy land.

  • FatherStorm (unregistered) in reply to Grimoire

    and they're using jQuery? anyone willing to use jQuery you'd think would be willing to experiment just a touch more with getting a web-version catalog.

  • FatherStorm (unregistered) in reply to Grimoire
    Grimoire:
    hallo.amt:
    Some companies are still doing it... http://www.hild-radwelt.zeg.de/Blaetterkataloge/Bulls2009DE/Blaetterkatalog/ take care, it's in German

    Still common practice in smaller companies. They really don't understand the concept of the web. Audio Video Unlimited does the same thing with their flyer: http://www.avu.ca/flyer/index.php. They create a low-res image of each page. For some of the pages, the smaller text is unreadable.

    and they're using jQuery? anyone willing to use jQuery you'd think would be willing to experiment just a touch more with getting a web-version catalog.

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to JohnFx
    JohnFx:
    universe man:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.
    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.
    ...and when they meet it's a happy land.
    I believe that will happen next on 21-Dec-2012. :-)
  • Dazed (unregistered)

    "On the inside, there wasn’t a piece of furniture or decoration that had been built post-cold war."

    So what's special about that? Would have been true for all the companies in at least my first half-dozen interviews. (Admittedly back then the cold war hadn't quite ended yet.)

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I kind of feel sad for the company. You have to wonder what sort of person runs a business and then shuts themselves up in a hole without caring how new trends can help them improve their business. Shouldn't a good business owner ALWAYS be looking to improve what they do?

    Oh, wait. The owner of the company was probably some middle-aged idiot who doesn't care a lick about actually running a business so long as he gets enough money coming in to pay for his six cars and huge house on the beach. Actually improve your company? Who does that?

    bitter much?

  • (cs) in reply to A Muffin
    A Muffin:
    Wooble:
    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.
    Still a WTF. Do you really need the year on your watch?
    Well, if you want your watch to adjust to leap year when displaying date, you would need to have the year at least in your watch.
  • Americium (unregistered) in reply to Optedout
    Optedout:
    Haha I have a customer like that .. but without ridiculous budget constraints .. thinking he's leading the information revolution.. I try to help as good as I can but sometimes they come up with ideas that were shot down decades ago :)

    Don't automatically discount ideas that were shot down decades ago. Some ideas need time to become feasible or accepted.

    A few thousand years ago a Greek invented a steam powered toy. Slavery was widely available to do the unpleasant work. Just go conquer the next city-state. So, no one followed through to build a steam engine until James Watt did it in the 1800's.

  • Brent (unregistered) in reply to A Muffin
    A Muffin:
    Still a WTF. Do you really need the year on your watch?

    Yes. That way you don't need to fiddle with the date every 4 years (minus every 100 plus every 400)... I'm tired of wasting those seconds.

    Watches which tell the year FTW, not WTF. TRWTF is digital watches that don't.

  • Seahen (unregistered)

    TRWTF was that he didn't take the job. The best boss to have is one who's easily impressed.

  • Vjg (unregistered) in reply to RobFreundlich

    I thought dog crap removal was the primary purpose of rain storms.

  • jay (unregistered)

    In fairness regarding the $2,000 budget ... My understanding of the story is that they're talking about hiring this guy as a full-time employee, not a consultant. In that case, the $2,000 budget would presumably not include his salary. If $2,000 is just supposed to cover software tools, it would be quite adequate for a modest web site.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    In fairness regarding the $2,000 budget ... My understanding of the story is that they're talking about hiring this guy as a full-time employee, not a consultant. In that case, the $2,000 budget would presumably not include his salary. If $2,000 is just supposed to cover software tools, it would be quite adequate for a modest web site.

    are you kidding? That won't cover servers and hosting for much of anything.

  • jay (unregistered)

    "... there wasn’t a piece of furniture or decoration that had been built post-cold war."

    You make this statement like this is something amazing. All the furniture is at least 20 years old. Okay. Old, but not incredibly so. Most of my life was before the end of the cold war, it doesn't seem like all that long ago.

  • Wesley (unregistered) in reply to Addison

    Building made out of asbestos ... "this huge job we have" ... "a budget of almost two thousand dollars" ... "enjoy the security of working for us"

    Addison:
    I mean really. They must not have hired anyone under 30 in the last 15 years.
    This company did not hire anyone in the last 15 years. And none of their incompetent employees left for better pastures either. It's possible they were not paying attention to their customers needs, but think of their suppliers. How could their suppliers not have online ordering, delivery tracking, online account management and payment? And $2000, you can't even fully equip a little league team for that. If they think $2000=huge, the TRWTF is how they stayed in business so long. Oh look this guy bought 10 baseball bats, wow, he's our customer of the month.
  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to T Bank
    T Bank:
    ... The web is not a magazine.

    Or a newspaper.

    Or a TV set.

    Or a movie.

    It's the web dammit. Still can't get people to hear that.

    The best way to get it across to the old folks is to use a really old example. Shortly after Thomas Edison invented the movie camera, someone thought of bringing a camera to a theater and planting it in the middle of the audience. It worked as well as you can imagine.

    I remember tearing my hair at some of those early Web sites that were designed by print-oriented artists. A bank site I used had two dozen images to download before you saw the login window. On dialup. It also had some Microsoft-supplied code that guaranteed that it was usable only with Internet Exploiter, but that didn't last after enough customers pointed out that there were, literally, half a dozen other banks in the neighborhood.

  • (cs) in reply to Unknown Unknowns
    Unknown Unknowns:
    Is the parent statement anti-"get off my lawn"?
    Get on my lawn?
  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I kind of feel sad for the company. You have to wonder what sort of person runs a business and then shuts themselves up in a hole without caring how new trends can help them improve their business. Shouldn't a good business owner ALWAYS be looking to improve what they do?

    Oh, wait. The owner of the company was probably some middle-aged idiot who doesn't care a lick about actually running a business so long as he gets enough money coming in to pay for his six cars and huge house on the beach. Actually improve your company? Who does that?

    PRO TIP: If your small business generates enough revenue that you can afford six cars and a beach house, odds are you're doing something right.

  • TC (unregistered) in reply to Frank

    For the love of god please provide link/screenshots/anything that is left of $4500 dog-sh*t website.

  • Chelloveck (unregistered) in reply to kastein
    kastein:
    I actually like that... my worst order ever from digikey was when I ordered some parts that fit every electrical spec I had, but they showed up and were approximately 1mm square.

    Um, are you saying that Digikey had no datasheet, mechanical spec, or even packaging information for those parts? Or that you just ignored them? Every time I've ordered from them or any other supplier, the mechanical specs are displayed as prominently as the electrical specs.

  • Robert S. Robbins (unregistered)

    This was in Pennsylvania, wasn't it?

  • Monday (unregistered)

    I'm not buying it.

    This old guy knew he needed a site for over 8 years, and during that time he never punched "sporting goods" into Google? Did a little market research? If anyone in the company knew anything about their competitors they'd know about their websites. Or at least amazon.com.

    //captcha: populus. Fun game.

  • Bags (unregistered) in reply to Georgem
    Georgem:
    Zylon:
    This story is so cringingly absurd, I'd really like to know which parts of it weren't made up.

    Ask.com

    They're real. You can google 'em and everything

    I hear you can even get to their website...

  • Beer, beer, beer (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I kind of feel sad for the company. You have to wonder what sort of person runs a business and then shuts themselves up in a hole without caring how new trends can help them improve their business. Shouldn't a good business owner ALWAYS be looking to improve what they do?

    Oh, wait. The owner of the company was probably some middle-aged idiot who doesn't care a lick about actually running a business so long as he gets enough money coming in to pay for his six cars and huge house on the beach. Actually improve your company? Who does that?

    bitter much?

    I'll have much bitter, please

  • Bobble (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    I remember tearing my hair at some of those early Web sites that were designed by print-oriented artists.

    I still see print media with 72dpi jpgs where a someone asked a client for an image and they likely said "Here is what we have on the website".

    I'm glad I learned long ago that those images get sent back and to ask them to find someone to help them get something with a proper print resolution.

  • (cs) in reply to Frank
    Frank:
    He ran a service that cleaned dog crap out of people's yards. He had 4 employees. $4500 website and I did it on the cheap. Can someone please tell me how lucrative the dog-sh*t market is??

    He had 4 employees, and apparently HAPPILY paid you $4500 for advertising. How lucrative do you think it is?

    Do dog's really shit out asterisks?

  • (cs) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    monkeyPushButton:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.
    Wooble:
    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.
    universe man:
    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.
    I'm more impressed that his watch can tell if it has traveled through a temporal anomoly and adjust itself acordingly.
    You mean yours doesn't?

    Mine used to... turns out they aren't so water proof. Technology, my foot.

  • (cs) in reply to monkeyPushButton
    monkeyPushButton:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.
    Wooble:
    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.
    universe man:
    He's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.
    I'm more impressed that his watch can tell if it has traveled through a temporal anomoly and adjust itself acordingly.

    It could be radio-controlled.

  • (cs) in reply to Frank

    Not to stray too far off-topic, but the crap-cleaning business may be more lucrative than you think. During a time when we had two dogs, I found it much less painful to pay $65/month to have someone clean our yard once per week than to do it myself. This guy had quite a lengthy client list, many of them paying for 2x/week service.

    He must have done pretty well, since one day his truck pulled up to our house and the business owner got out with another person.

    "This is my apprentice," he said.

  • (cs) in reply to T Bank

    I also had a wonderful experience with a "web catalog" that I created for a local company. Could not for the life of me get them to do it right. Hell, even after they threw out my design after many years, they're STILL almost treating it like a web version of their paper catalog. The original design was LITERALLY taking their paper catalog and duplicating it online.

    BTW, the one I'm talking about is at: http://dashtop.com

    Take a look at like like 1999 on the Wayback Machine to see the original design.

    T Bank:
    Wow! That is so 1995. Yes I worked for a fortune 500 company that put its mail-order catalog on the web. Despite every technical person in sight screaming that this is not the way to do it, they insisted on having every web page an exact photographic duplicate of the printed catalog.

    Rewind your mind, if you can, to 1200 baud modems. Imagine how long an 8 1/2 by 11 "inch" .gif file takes to download...

    Yes they insisted on measuring everything in "inches". Couldn't waste the time to hear about "pixels" much less the radical idea that other people don't have your computer.

    After many months and many dollars the site did exactly as we all expected: flat nothing. So, of course, they promoted the genius whose brainchild this was.

    The web is not a magazine.

    Or a newspaper.

    Or a TV set.

    Or a movie.

    It's the web dammit. Still can't get people to hear that.

  • acid (unregistered)

    To be frank, I'm having trouble seeing the WTF in this story.

    I hate to be the one to break it to everyone here, but there are people out there who don't understand technology anywhere near as well as we do. There are people out there who are NOT well versed in the uses of the internet, or with the lessons we've all learned along the way.

    FFS people, when we go to a doctor or solicitor, we expect them to give us advice. We expect them to do their job in a way that protects us and but also teaches us a little more about what we can be changing in our daily lives so that we are not so reliant on them in the future. Why is it any different for us?

    I hate to be the one who has to point this out all the time, but most people out there are hanging on by a very thin thread when it comes to the insertion of technology in their lives. They're coming to us to make it better. To make their pain go away just like a doctor or solicitor would. We're supposed to be professionals and experts, what's the point of that if we don't make their lives that little bit better?

    Alright, $4.5k for a turd removal business website where the owner INSISTS that's what he wants, well at least the consultant in question tried to talk him out of it, and he didn't listen. How many smokers have been told by their doctors to quit and don't? But as professionals, we have to try.

    Sure Erhen didn't take the job, but instead of looking for temporal anomalies perhaps he could have taken 10 mins out of his day to explain the realities to this man. Perhaps he did and it's just been edited out. In any case, the man may have listened, or he may have completely ignored Erhen and hired the next guy who came along who was ready to give him a crap (no pun intended) system for $2k. But, ethically Erhen could've held his head high knowing that he's tried to help.

    Expecting everyone on the planet to be au fais with technology, and the internet, and with the risks of phishing and malware and viruses etc. just seems a little naive to me.

    Once my own father (a career journalist) came up to me with this great idea for a classified advertising site on the internet. He wanted to charge by column centimetre (we use real measurement standards here in Australia). I could have laughed or poo-pooed (again no pun intended) the idea, instead I took 20 mins to explain to him the basics of how itnernet advertising works, what the market model was, and pointed him to sites like Allclassifieds here in Oz so he could see how it was done. In the end, he realised that it WAS a good idea, but it had already been done several times.

    This idea and his take on it doesn't make him an idiot. It makes him a specialist in his field, and he was trying to relate to a new technology and new way of doing things using the only framework he had available to him at the time to make sense of it. It wasn't sufficient, so I supplied the right one.

    And THAT people is our job. With the exception of documentation, training and education seems to be the area where the most of us fall down. Not everyone sees the world through our eyes and with our knowlege, and nor should they. I wouldn't like to go to a doctor who was a great techo but didn't know what was happening inside me. He's an expert in his field, and I'm an expert in mine.

    Alex et al - this site has lost its way. It's one thing to hold those of us who consider ourselves experts up to ridicule by our peers when we deserve it, but it's quite another to effectively make fun of someone who shouldn't necessarily know better.

    IMHO, TRWTF (if there is one) is that Erhen didn't take a small amount of time out of his day to try and help educate the man. He had the right idea after all, what he needed was an expert. If the story is accurate in that effect, then Erhen failed him by not being that for him.

  • J Wynia (unregistered)

    The dog poo market is probably more lucrative than the web design market is. Lots of people want it gone and no one in the dog poo market is complaining about the wannabe's picking up dog poo for free.

  • S (unregistered) in reply to Wooble
    Wooble:
    AndrewB:
    The real WTF is that Erhen's watch tells him what year it is.

    He just found out about this great new product called a "digital" watch. They're available in all the better mail-order catalogs. One day, you may even be able to buy one on the Internet.

    Well. Even if there was a timewarp, the time on the watch shouldn't have changed.

  • Ike (unregistered) in reply to Monday
    Monday:
    I'm not buying it.

    This old guy knew he needed a site for over 8 years, and during that time he never punched "sporting goods" into Google? Did a little market research? If anyone in the company knew anything about their competitors they'd know about their websites. Or at least amazon.com.

    //captcha: populus. Fun game.

    Google? Isn't that the company with six kids in a garage? Why would he need to check with them?

  • Crusty (unregistered) in reply to J Wynia
    J Wynia:
    The dog poo market is probably more lucrative than the web design market is. Lots of people want it gone and no one in the dog poo market is complaining about the wannabe's picking up dog poo for free.

    +1

  • Just Another Geek (unregistered) in reply to Frank

    You would not believe how lucrative the dog-crap cleaning market is, because of how LAZY the general population is. Check out: http://www.yuckos.com/

  • (cs)

    More Tales from the Interview... please. Maybe it is because I interview people, but TftI should be featured more (and Error'd less) on here. Love 'em.

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