Sales in Japan and the West

I get the impression that in the West, sales is all about closing the deal.

A salesman thinks his job is done when the deal is closed. A lot of Americans, in particular, can be such reality-distorted optimists that in my experience some of them act as if their commission is already in the bank from the point that it merely appears that the deal is going to close. When things fall through (as is increasingly common in these times) they are honestly surprised and shocked and angry.

In Japan, always a few degrees less flaky than America in most aspects, a salesman isn't as defined by the deals he's made and closed, so much as the maintenance of existing relationships. After a deal closes, his job begins in earnest.

Japanese clients seldom start out placing any kind of large order to a supplier or vendor they are using for the first time. They start out placing a small order and carefully observe the level of quality and service they are receiving. They are particularly finicky about the kind of customer support they get from the salesman, how responsive he is, how clear his explanation is, and his approach to dealing with errors or trouble. If they are satisfied they will progressively place larger and larger orders.

CD/DVD drive keeps disappearing

I keep "losing" my CD/DVD drive on my new Dell.

Happens almost every day but not constantly. CDs don't get mounted, and if I look in My Computer the CD drive icon is gone. In the Device Manager too, the CD ROM device category is gone. Conversely, in the Hard Drives category some mystery item shows up, with a garbage character name.

Restarting seems to fix it. But still, WTF?

Called Dell Support, spoke to a lady named Kudo-san. We did the following two steps.

• Set the BIOS to default settings.
• Uninstall the CD drive from the Device Manager. Restarting the PC reinstalls it.

She will call back on Monday to ask if things are OK.

This new Dell is turning out to be quite a hassle.

Internet up and down today

Checked Air Station settings page. Fails on Name Resolution step.

Called Flets helpline. Received guidance as follows.

Create an internet connection as follows:
Internet Properties -> Connections [tab] -> Setup [btn in top right]
Run wizard
[o] Connect to the Internet
[o] Set up my connection manually
[o] Connect using a broadband connection that requires a user name and password
ISP Name: [anything]
User name: guest@flets
Password: guest

If we can connect here it means that the problem is either in the router or with the provider (e.g. Nifty)
http://www.flets/
(Note there's no .com or .jp at the end)

Was able to view it fine, indicating I may need to call Nifty. He gave me the following Nifty numbers.
0120-818-275
03-5753-2373

Called Nifty and was given these new numbers.
0120-322-210
03-5860-7600

Called Nifty but was told it would be a 20 minute wait. Seems to be OK for now so I won't bother.

Excel 2007 crashing

I am running Office 2007, on Windows XP Service Pack 3, brand-new Dell Latitude E6500.

Excel was crashing without fail whenever I tried to close a document with using the close box (top right). I mean Close Window, to close the document, not the one to close Excel itself. It didn't crash when I closed my doc using the Close menu item in the Office Button.

I seem to have resolved it by disabling the COM Add-in "Send to Bluetooth":c:\windows\system32\btsendto_office.dll

Japanese applications on English Windows XP

I have long been running Japanese applications on an English version of Windows XP on my old self-made PC. I built that sucker in early 2003 and it's still going strong. In fact that's an understatement, it's actually my main work machine! I may have had various problems at the beginning with Japanese apps, but have not had any in nearly 6 years. So I had forgotten what it was like.

Anyway, my new Dell Latitude E6500 notebook came with an English XP. I installed Japanese Buffalo wireless client software so it can talk to my Buffalo router, and this software displayed a lot of garbage characters. Later I installed Hidemaru and had the same problem, lots of garbage characters.

I poked around and found the solution:
Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Advanced -> Language for non-Unicode programs

I set this to Japanese, and this solved the problem.

Resolution on new Dell notebook

My new Dell Latitude E6500 arrived!

Anyway, the first shocker was that its resolution is so good. Too good, in fact.

In fact it's optimized at 1920 x 1200 px. On a 15.4 inch screen that makes for some very small text! Maybe I'm getting old, but it was really hurting my eyes.

I tried playing with the following settings:

1. Display Properties -> Appearance -> Font size
2. Display Properties -> Settings -> Screen resolution
3. Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> DPI setting

Nothing was satisfactory. If I changed the resolution, e.g. to 1280 x 1024 px, I would have to use the Intel graphics board driver settings, additionally, to maintain the aspect ratio, otherwise everything becomes stretched sideways. But if I did that it ends up shortening the screen width and I end up with unused vertical black bands of space on the left and right edges of my monitor. Which is wasteful, considering how valuable screen real estate is! Trying various values of 1 and 3 above too didn't bring satisfactory results.

I called Dell tech support and the guy's advice was to leave the resolution at the native 1920 x 1200, leave the font size in 1 above as Normal, and change the DPI in 3 above to 125% or 150%. The font size in 1 is just the fonts, whereas the DPI setting changes the size of everything such as icons.

So I did so, but all the text layout everywhere still looked really sloppy. I was losing hope and was considering returning the machine. I stepped out for a bit to go to the bank and grab lunch... and it occurred to me that perhaps I should try restarting... after all the DPI setting dialog explicitly tells you that some programs won't work properly if you don't. I was just in the habit of not restarting.

So when I got back home I restarted, and lo and behold things displayed quite nicely!

Hopefully this will be of use to whoever reads this.

Flock browser

Trying it out for the first time. In fact I'm writing this post in it's blog editor. Will it work? We'll soon find out. :)

Edit: Looks like it worked!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

StumbleUpon

I signed up to StumbleUpon a while ago, but have only recently started using it in earnest. I don't think I am deriving the full potential benefit yet.

One benefit is that I constantly run into articles or other web content I am interested in. The clutter up my browser's bookmarks, so this is a good place to keep them separately, and come back to read them when I have the time.

Another benefit is that by using the "Stumble" function you get random articles or sites that may (or may not) be of interest to you. As you use it the program progressively determines your tastes and interests, and (ideally) would be recommending content more and more to your liking.

A third benefit is through your friends lists you Stumble (or just view) articles that they are interested in, and hence "recommending".

So far I have mainly derived the first of the above benefits. The system still doesn't "know" me well enough and a lot of the content that I "Stumble Upon" is not of interest. I also have not added many friends yet, but am trying to increase their number. Maybe when that reaches some critical mass the third benefit will kick in more.

This is all mitigated by the fact that I really shouldn't be spending so much time reading stuff on the internet! It can be endless.

(This post was originallly a message I sent in StumbleUpon to my uncle Sanjit Sengupta, but I thought it summed up my thoughts on StumbleUpon sufficiently to share with others.)

NTT guys come by

NTT guys came at 10 AM and just left.
They did the following:

• Have me using a new switching machine in the pump room, was Machine 1, is now Machine 3
• New connection coming from switching machine to the point outside my room
• New connection coming from point outside my room to the room itself
• New modem. Same lamps as the old one.

Net connection goes down again

• Unplugged router and modem and restarted machine, to no avail.
• Eventually came back on its own.
• Called 0120-242-751 and spoke to a lady named Kawasumi-san.
• Confirmed that the connection was unstable around 16:45 but is back up now.
• She said a guy will come over tomorrow morning.

What's up with Firefox 3?

I started using Firefox 3 a few weeks ago and am immensely dissatisfied.

It seems to hang a fair bit. I try to start it up and nothing happens. I take a look in Windows Task Manager and it's there. I kill the process and try again.

Sometimes this fixes the problem, but sometimes it repeats itself. I kill it again, try starting it again, and so on. After a few cycles it may start up. Sometimes I just restart the machine which solves the problem.

I never had this issue with Firefox 2.

I also find it is generally slow to start up. The Bookmarks functionality has also degraded. When I go into my bookmark folders to select a link, I used to be able to right click there and there would be a "Sort by Name" selection. That's not there any more. Adding bookmarks is also very slow. The dialog to add a bookmark is now modal, and with no window title. It is really degraded, as if under development again or something.

I wonder what the hell they did to it?

Bookmarking

The past couple of years saw a great proliferation of bookmarking applications.

Of course del.icio.us has been around for a few years. It even seems to have changed its name to delicious.com.

Then I tried ma.gnolia. Actually I'm never sure where that goddamn period goes. That alone turns me off from using it. I don't know why they would go out of their way to come up with such a difficult-to-remember-precisely name. Unless they are exceptionally good, it's just suicide on their part. And I wouldn't characterize it as exceptionally good.

I have yet to really get into the idea of sharing bookmarks. They seem a bit personal to me.

So the main thing I use is Foxmarks, without sharing.

More internet connectivity problems

Were having problems yesterday.
First in the day. Solved by unplugging router and modem and restarting machine.
Then in the evening.
Then again repeatedly at night.

Called koshou center, they saw something fishy at our building's main device.
Guy came this morning and saw that it was OK, but did some routine maintenance.