256 Perl-tips subscribers
Our Perl Tips newsletter has been running for almost a year now, and during that time we've posted slightly more frequently than one tip per fortnight. While the newsletter's first birthday is rapidly approaching, we've also hit another important milestone, with 256 subscribers on the list. I finally have an excuse to upgrade to a 16-bit architecture.

The most encouraging part of writing regular Perl tips is the feedback that we've received. We know that our tips are regularly forwarded around a number of organisations, and we're always seeing new subscribers who have happened upon our archive and then decided to subscribe to the regular newsletter.

Planned improvements to the tips includes sorting the archive into categories. When we only had a few tips, a chronological ordering is fine. Now that we have lots of tips, a more categorised approach rapidly becoming appropriate.

Turtles
Went walking to the shops with Jacinta yesterday via Coburg lake, and much to our surprise we found a turtle along the way. It was small (about 20cm along the shell), incredibly cute, and most of the way up a very tall hill.

I can't even begin to imagine why a turtle would be climbing the hill, but it didn't look very happy about it. The weather was warm and dry, it was a long way from the water, and it would be an easy target for dogs or other predators.

We picked up the gorgeous little turtle and returned it to the water, where it immediately demonstrated that except on land it is a very graceful creature, and can move at very high speeds. During the process I discovered that turtles can get quite excited if you pick them up, and so it's best to have them facing towards you should you do so. They also have amazingly sharp claws, which were thankfully easy to avoid.

I do find it rather cool that our local lake has at least one turtle, and hopefully many more.

Negotiating and ammunition
I seem to do an awful lot of business negotiations. Most of these follow the simple rule of making other people feel good about themselves. While we may be very unhappy about an invoice being overdue, we're very appreciative of the people working hard to make sure it gets paid. This is the key to effective negotiation, getting other people to want to help you. At the end everyone feels good about the outcomes, and you can look forward to a happy and effective relationship for years to come.

Unfortunately, there will be times (rarely) when making other people feel good and using carrots doesn't work. In these situations, it can help to have a way of underscoring the importance of your situation. To do that, you need what's called ammunition.

Ammunition is anything you can use to assist your case, and it can come in many forms. Letters, telephone transcripts, invoices, logbooks, and many other things can be useful and revelant to your negotiations. Usually ammunition is handed to you by the organisation with which you're negotiating, and it helps to be able to organise this effectively.

Probably the best thing we've ever done in our business is to use a job tracking system (we use RT) to manage negotiations with our clients and suppliers. This helps to keep things organised, and ideally results in tickets providing dated logs of previous correspondence. We almost never need this, and on the occasions we do just providing a dated summary of past negotiations is usually sufficient to have your case favourably considered. Of course, this should be done in the nicest possible way, to give the other party as many opportunities as possible to help you.

In all negotiations it's of paramount importance ot have a goal. Maybe you want something refunded, or a discount, or an invoice to be paid, or a particular rate of pay or timeframe. This gives you something concrete to work towards, and helps in being able to state your position and desires clearly. A lot of people make the mistake of submitting a complaint or raising a matter without having a firm goal of what they want in return.

In my recent negotiations with one organisation I've struck a difficult problem. We have plenty of ammunition, but the goal is a difficult one to reach. We want them not to suck. Unfortunately they have an effective monopoly, so finding an alternate supplier will be challenging at the very least.

After months of disputes and problems, it looks like the matter has finally been escalated and is starting to come to a head. It's amazing that our previous complaints (some of which were exactingly to the point) didn't produce the same response as a few words from their supplier that we actively wish to jump ship. We've demonstrated that we have crates of ammunition, and that there are real systemic issues. Unfortunately I don't know if that's going to help us, and the existing proposals for reducing suck coefficients don't fill me with confidence.

Worst case scenario is that we reduce our interactions with this supplier to the point whereby they can suck all they want and still not impact our business. That may involve reducing our interactions to none whatsoever.

Business tips: Interrupt your clients
There's a financial concept called Goodwill. Despite the name, which makes you feel all warm and happy inside, it has a very precise definition. Goodwill is when a consumer purchases your product at a higher price than an equivalent product from your competitors. This quantifies the intuitive meaning of goodwill towards an organisation, but also covers less intuitive concepts such as brand-name loyalty.

A lot of businesses stay in business because of their goodwill assets. Our printers are a perfect example. They charge more than the bigger printing house down the road, and other printers have approached us with better deals; so why do we continue to use the same printers we've been dealing with for years? The answer is simple, we think they rock.

Our printers will work to tight deadlines. If there are problems, which there rarely are, they will fix them quickly and efficiently, and at no extra charge. They're friendly sociable people who send us cards and wine during the festive season. Our printers get an A+ for people management, and hold a large amount of goodwill because of that.

Today was the first day that I realised that there also exists badwill, which has an equally precise financial meaning. Badwill is the amount that a client will pay extra to avoid purchasing your product. The more badwill a company has, the more competitive it needs to be. Companies that hold a monopoly seem to be the ideal accumulators of badwill, they can stay in business a very long time simply because they have no competitors.

My task tomorrow is to negotiate with our suppliers to whom we feel badwill towards, ones that we'd joyfully drop given any reasonable alternative. My negotiations will involve me explaining all the ways that we've been unreasonably treated, and to set out the amount of money that we'd like to be refunded in compensation. This is an unfortunately common occurance, and while they money helps, I'd much prefer them to get their act together.

The whole thing has me wondering what generates goodwill and badwill in business relationships, and surprisingly most of it seems to revolve around a single point: communication.

The suppliers who we like the most are very good at what they do, but they also communicate. If something is going to be late or problematic, then we'll get a phone-call about that. The earlier we get the call, the longer we have to resolve the issue, and the happier we are. The important thing to note here is that these suppliers will interrupt our flow of business to warn us of upcoming problems.

The suppliers who we like the least have the opposite problem. Rather than calling us when there's a problem, we have to stumble over the problem ourselves and then call them. Worst still is when one of our clients discover the problem before we do. We have to keep on calling these suppliers to determine the status of our work, and otherwise keep the matter on-track. This is a polling type arrangement, and as we all know that consumes a lot of resources.

It seems that communication is the largest difference between our good suppliers and our bad ones. Of course, if you're running a business, you want to have goodwill with your customers. Think about how you can structure your processes to provide better communication to your clients, especially think about ways in which you can inform them in advance of anything good or bad that may affect their business. Calling your clients with bad news may be unappealing, but it's much better than them calling you after they've discovered it on their own.

Geek Education and The Princess Bride
I was fortunate enough to spend the first two days of this week attending Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices course. The course was enjoyable, but there were a couple of points that I found perplexing.

At one point during the day, Damian made reference to The Princess Bride, illiciting a chuckle from both Jacinta and myself. However, the rest of the attendees were silent. Perhaps they were just nervous, but perhaps some of them had never actually watched The Princess Bride. Inconceivable!

I've noticed in recent years that more and more IT professionals seem to be lacking the common history and background that I'd normally expect. This includes popular geek culture (Star Wars, The Princess Bride), jargon (grok, kludge, hack), and computer science (order-of, sorting techniques, halting problem, Turing machines, P vs NP, stacks and queues, linked lists, hashes).

Of course, I don't expect such advanced knowledge from people who are new to computer science, or who have simply fallen into IT skills as a by-product of their job. However I encounter people who have studied computer science, who do have it as their life and job, and yet they don't grok sorting algorithms. They think that Roguelike games are a special olympics for a World of Warcraft character class. Help me, Obi-Wan...

Like all things, the culture of computer science is moving on. Much of this is caused by the sheer ubiquity of computers, and the fact that for most people computers are no longer a transparent box filled with tools and bugs from which to craft something wonderful. Computers are instead finished products in their own right. Our new generations are learning how to use brightly coloured operating systems, where a register is where you pay for that operating system, rather than a location in which to store data.

Overall I view these changes as a good thing. People can use computers to get things done, and get on with their life, rather than having to devote their lifetime to study. However it does make me feel a little old. While certainly not in the first generation of computer scientists, I had ample opportunity to interact and learn from them. I still have my friends gather round and ask for the tales of the Internet before spam.

Oddly, I find the most disturbing aspect of this is that some of my humour is becoming stale. A few years ago I could get a round of laughter by mentioning that CPAN is so great, we even have a module that solves the halting problem; whereas these days it's likely to be met with awkward silence. Inconceivable!

Canberra
Spent the last week in Canberra, teaching our Perl courses. While the courses went well, we're not particularly happy with our facilities providers who put us in a room that was too small for our needs, and which had decidedly dodgy air-conditioning. If you provide computer facilities for hire in Canberra, and have a policy of not screwing your customers, then now's a great time to get in touch.

One of the best aspects of the trip was the hotel. Rejane and Victor, the owners of Quest Canberra, get a huge thumbs up for their friendliness and service. We had our room upgraded (twice!), we were presented with a complimentary bottle of wine on check-in, and we were given a sufficency of drink vouchers for the pub next door. Plus they held our bags for us on the last day. It's so refreshing to encounter a business that's so committed to making its customers happy, and who properly understands the value of raising good-will.

While in Canberra I met up with the local Canberra Perl Mongers group. Unfortunately I didn't realise how long it would take for our food to arrive, so presentations happened much later than expected. I got a few chuckles from my Mind Control talk, and had a surprisingly good reaction from my old talk on Using Strict. Andrew Pollock also gave a presentation on watching directories in Linux and how to control his server by remote e-mail.

On Thursday night Jacinta and myself had the honour of catching up with Pia Waugh from Linux Australia. The meeting was held in the Pancake Parlour, which appears to be a happening place for geeky things in Canberra, due to its free and unrestricted wireless access, which incidentally was set up by one of the Canberra.PM members. We chatted with Pia about a variety of topics, including false teeth, quarantine, and open source, as well as resetting the password on a Linux box that one of our students had brought along.

Renovations
Ian and Sofie are renovating their house in preparation for sale, and both Jacinta and myself, along with many other friends and family, have been having a grand time helping them out. My main tasks have been climbing on tall ladders, painting, and shovelling rocks and soil. In return we keep getting fed with extremely nice foodstuffs, so I think we're getting the better deal out of the bargain. Sofie's parents in particular have been excellent company, and have kept me well-stocked with beer, food, and humour during my visits.

Role-playing
After two years of running my 1st Ed AD&D roleplaying game, the party has defeated the incredibly hard encounter that was supposed to appear in the first adventure, and is almost up to the point where they can start to survive the main content. The running joke is that we'll still won't have finished in sixty years time.